Jim Moy

The Theory of Diminished Urgency has always been in the back of my head, like so many fuzzy thoughts. But becoming a parent clarified it quite a bit. It’s very simple, and applies to many facets of life. Simply put, the further away from a real deadline you are, so proportionally is diminished the urgency to meet the deadline. Which sounds like simple procrastination, but that’s within a given individual’s control, and is simply a matter of discipline.

Where this theory comes in is in group situations where you don’t have control over the other participants. In the case of my family, the real, hard deadline for getting the four of us out of the house might be 8:30am. We know we can do it if the first adult is out of bed at 7:30am. But the ensuing cacophany is stressful.

So let’s say I decide to drive the issue and get started at 6:30am (which has only happened occasionally, but this is hypothetical). I might be cracking the whip by 7am, but the kids know they don’t really have to be moving at full speed that early, so they dawdle. Hence, diminished urgency.

An individual’s personal urgency has a coefficient of inertia to it, which takes energy to change, so what we find is that it doesn’t matter how much earlier you try to accomplish your goals, the distractions available to the participants with diminished urgency combined with the overhead of tending to them unavoidably leads you to accomplishing your goals pretty much at the hard deadline anyway.

The mathematical forumlation of the coefficient of inertia and its application to the ability of organizations to successfully ship products on time is left as an exercise for the reader.

My wife solves the problem by setting her clock ahead fifteen minutes. Seems to work for her.