Open Thread: Can You Live Without Urgency?

Over at the 37Signals company blog, they’ve recently posted a piece titled “Urgency is poisonous.” In it, they say that they’ve found moving to a 4-day workweek without timeclocks to be good for the company. They go on to say “urgency is overrated” and to propose that just about everything can wait a few days to get done.

Looking around at web worker culture, though, it’s hard to believe that many web workers would agree. With our always-on connectivity and fretting about work-life balance, it seems that we’re not only immersed in urgency, we’re addicted to it: we need to know what is happening right now, and then Get Things Done to deal with it.For that matter, there’s a thread of business culture that goes back at least as far as Ben Franklin musing on the benefits of “early to bed, early to rise.” The default assumption is that there is a good reason for urgency, at least if you want to be the one who gets the sales and the success.

How do you feel about urgency in your own career? Are things out of whack and stressing you out too much? Have you managed to strike a balance and turn off the urgency? Or are you convinced that your continued attention to fast action will enable you to take business away from your slacker competitors?

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