What is mere urgency effect?

Mere urgency effect is a concept in personal epistemology: Urgency is a feeling not a measure of value — most urgent things are not important.

Example: Your phone buzzes with a Slack message asking whether the team should use tabs or spaces in the config file. Your chest tightens slightly — someone is waiting. Meanwhile, the architecture document that would prevent six months of technical debt sits in a tab you haven't opened in three days. The Slack thread feels urgent because someone is watching. The architecture document is important because it shapes the next two quarters. You answer the Slack message. The document waits another day. This is not a time management failure — it is an urgency-importance confusion playing out exactly as the research predicts.

This concept is part of Phase 35 (Priority Systems) in the How to Think curriculum, which builds the epistemic infrastructure for priority systems.