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Eisenhower and the coronavirus
In case of urgency, the unimaginable can become the feasible
Say you had two tasks competing for your attention: one is very important, the other one is very urgent. Which one would you do first? Chances are, you’ll pick the urgent one. Not only does this seem self-evident, there is even a reasonable evolutionary explanation for this. The kind of urgent situations our early ancestors were confronted with often required a swift response to ensure survival.
The upside of urgency
Imagine an individual engaged in the important task of gathering wood, suddenly encountering a sabre-tooth tiger with a gastronomic interest in them. If they decided the important activity must take precedence over running away like greased lightning, they would probably not survive long enough ensure their genes were passed on to the next generation. And so, a hierarchical sense of priority of the urgent over the important may well be, to some extent, hardwired.
And this tendency to act on what is urgent can still serve us well. I am sure I am not the only person who, as a student, found it hard to start revising for my next exam if that was not taking place for another week. It’s only when it came well and truly in sight — two days, three days max — that I suddenly found the motivation…
