Track every urgent-feeling demand for a week — your false…

When This Fires

• Before implementing urgency management practices (provides the baseline data)
• When you feel like "everything is urgent" and can't prioritize
• After a period of reactive, urgency-driven work and wanting to regain control
• Any time you suspect your urgency filter is miscalibrated

Common Failure Mode

Logging only the demands you responded to as urgent, not all demands that felt urgent. The log must include items you successfully deferred too — because those were also urgency signals that you overrode. The full picture requires both: responded-to urgency AND deferred urgency, scored against actual time-sensitivity.

The Protocol

For one week: (1) Every time something feels urgent — email, Slack, request, self-imposed pressure — log it with a timestamp and brief description. (2) At end of day, score each item on two dimensions: actual time-sensitivity (1-5) and impact-if-delayed-two-hours (1-5). (3) After the week: items scoring 4-5 on both dimensions were genuinely urgent. Everything else was false urgency. (4) Calculate your false urgency rate: (total items - genuine urgent items) / total items. (5) Use this rate to calibrate: when the next "urgent" demand arrives, you now know that [X]% of the time, it's not actually urgent.