Urgent is Rarely Urgent

Jeremy · 0:00

Hey, everyone, it's Jeremy Burrows, host of The Leader Assistant Podcast. Today's leadership quote comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower. I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

Speaker 2 · 0:21

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become irreplaceable, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:32

Please review on iTunes. Episode 27. Hello, friends. Thanks for tuning in. I do want to say sorry for my voice today. I'm getting over a cold, but I really wanted to get this recorded because there's only so much time in a day, and I have the time now, so I'm taking advantage of it. Today's episode is about urgency and the fact that most things are not actually urgent. It's a shame that this topic needs to be addressed, but many assistants, including myself, have experienced bosses in our prior jobs or in our current jobs, for some of you who treat everything as urgent. Off-the-clock text messages, phone calls while we're on vacation, just leaving us annoyed, overworked, and burned out. Yes, true emergencies happen, and yes, some of us have to be on call 24-7, depending on our roles, but just because our executive calls something an emergency doesn't make it a true emergency. Most things can wait. Think about the last time you received a text message or a phone call from your executive during off hours. Could it have waited until you were back online the next day? Most of the time, the answer is yes. So how many of those times would a simple email from your executive asking you to take care of it the next day have been more sufficient? Of course, it's not your job to define what is or isn't an emergency. That's your executive's job. However, it's your job to be a good leader assistant. So one thing I would do to address this issue going forward is to sit down with your executive and set up expectations of when you're online, when you're offline, but also clarify what's an emergency. Clarify what is in fact urgent and get in the habit of thinking twice before you reply to a midnight text message to help set boundaries for yourself so that your executive will get used to you not replying in these odd hours as opposed to you replying at all hours of the day, any day of the week, whether on vacation or not. So part of the blame is on ourselves if we are very responsive all the time and don't set those boundaries. And also if we treat things that aren't urgent as urgent, then our executive will tend to do the same thing. So the next time your executive pings you while you're offline, ask yourself an honest question. Is this something that is urgent or is this something that I can handle when I'm back online? Now, you may have to do a few times where you reply back saying, I will get back to this in the morning, or I'll get to this as soon as I get into the office, or can this wait? But just remember, urgent is rarely urgent. And sit down with your executive to clearly define what is an emergency and what is not an emergency. And the last thing I want to talk about in this episode is the mode of communication and sitting down with your executive and coming up with a plan for what mode of communication is priority and urgent and what is not. So for example, my executive and I, we have a system set up where a phone call is typically the highest urgency. A text message would be the second highest and then a Slack instant message would be following that and then email. So for example, if I get an email, typically if I can respond to it within 24 hours, I'm in good shape. If I get a Slack IM, I try to respond to it in an hour or so. If I get a text message, I try to respond to it within five minutes. And if I get a phone call, I answer it no matter what meeting I'm in, no matter who I'm meeting with, I absolutely answer that call. But my executive does a good job of not abusing that power of the urgent phone call. And he will only call me if he really needs to talk and it's actually something that he needs right then. So anyway, you can sit down and figure out what type of communication works best for you and your boss. But I think it's very good to have clear guard rails up with your medium that you use to communicate. So I hope this was helpful. You can check out show notes for a couple of links to articles where I talk about this topic at leaderassistant.com/27. And as always, I really appreciate you listening. Please email me at podcast at leaderassistant.com if you have ideas for the show or even if you'd like to be a guest on the show. I'd love to have you and love to chat and have you share your story with the world. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.