Artificial urgency or doing things before they are urgent.

The world works on artificial urgency.

The University Exams, the education calendar, the company’s financial reports don’t need to be annual. But making them annual serves a purpose. It takes the choice away from the person involved. You can’t make exceptions anymore. It keeps the machine running. It brings in artificial urgency.

The naturally urgent things happen on their own. You feel the urge to eat (hunger), you eat. You feel the urge to relieve yourself, you go and do it. That’s how the human body and mind are designed. And if we acted only based on the natural urgencies, then we would not necessarily be different from the other species.

Instead, we started creating artificial urgencies. Most of what the schools and universities and companies are doing is creating artificial urgency. None of it is urgent in the real sense. But if we don’t create this artificial urgency, it may be too late when the natural urgency kicks in.

What does that mean for us? We have two options in our life. Either to become a part of someone else’s calendar or to create artificial urgency of our own, where we do not have a choice. There is no third option, if we want to succeed.

The natural cycles of days, weeks, months and years provide us with a framework that we can design our ambitions around. The question is: how can we ensure that our artificial urgencies are enforced?