How to Prioritise When Everything Feels Urgent

One of the most common things people say in time management training is this:

“Everything feels urgent.”

Not some things. Not the odd busy week.

Everything.

Emails pile up, meetings fill the diary, tasks keep coming, and it can feel like no matter how hard you work, you’re always reacting rather than getting ahead.

The problem isn’t usually effort or motivation. It’s that when everything feels urgent, prioritisation breaks down.

Once that happens, stress rises, confidence drops, and work starts to feel overwhelming.

In this article, we’ll look at why this happens, why traditional advice often falls short, and how to prioritise in a way that’s realistic for modern working life.

Why Everything Starts to Feel Urgent

Urgency isn’t always about deadlines.

Often, tasks feel urgent because they arrive loudly. Emails, instant messages, meeting requests, and reminders all compete for attention in real time.

Quiet but important work – thinking, planning, improving systems – gets pushed aside because it doesn’t shout as loudly.

Another reason urgency builds is lack of clarity.

When priorities aren’t clear, everything feels important by default. If you don’t know what matters most, your brain treats everything as a potential risk.

Over time, this creates a constant low-level sense of pressure. You might be busy all day, yet still feel like you’ve achieved very little.

Urgent vs Important – Why the Simple Model Isn’t Enough

Many people are introduced to prioritisation through the idea of urgent versus important. It’s a useful starting point, but on its own it can feel frustratingly simplistic.

In theory, you should focus on important work and avoid being pulled into urgency. In reality, most roles involve a steady stream of genuinely time-sensitive tasks alongside longer-term responsibilities.

The issue isn’t that people don’t understand the difference. It’s that they don’t have a practical way to apply it in a fast-moving environment.

Telling someone to “just focus on what’s important” doesn’t help much if:

• their inbox is constantly filling up

• they’re responsible for other people

• or they’re expected to respond quickly

Prioritisation needs to work within those constraints, not pretend they don’t exist.

The Real Problem: Too Many Competing Commitments

When everything feels urgent, it’s often because you’re holding too much in your head.

Tasks live in emails, meeting notes, instant messages, notebooks, and mental reminders.

Your brain becomes the storage system, constantly trying to remember what’s outstanding and what might be coming next.

This makes prioritisation almost impossible. You can’t make good decisions if you don’t have a clear, complete picture of your work.

Before you try to decide what to do first, you need to make sure you actually know what’s on your plate.

Step One: Get Everything Out of Your Head

The first step in prioritising isn’t ranking tasks – it’s capturing them.

That means having one trusted place where all your tasks live. Not some in your head, some in emails, and some scribbled down somewhere else.

Once everything is captured, two things happen:

• your brain relaxes because it’s no longer acting as the reminder system

• you can see the true volume of what you’re dealing with

This alone often reduces the feeling of urgency.

Digital task tools like Microsoft To Do work well here, especially when they’re linked to Outlook so flagged emails and tasks don’t get lost.

The specific tool matters less than the habit of using one central system consistently.

Step Two: Decide What Actually Deserves Attention Now

Once tasks are visible, prioritisation becomes about choice, not reaction.

A helpful question to ask is:

“If I only made progress on three things today, what should they be?”

This forces you to think in terms of impact rather than volume. It also recognises that you have limited time and energy, no matter how long your task list is.

Not everything urgent needs to be done by you, and not everything important needs to be done today.

At this point, light categorisation can help. For example:

• tasks that genuinely need action today

• tasks that matter but can wait

• tasks that can be delegated, delayed, or removed

You don’t need a complex system. You need something you’ll actually use.

Why Leaders Often Struggle More with Prioritisation

Prioritisation becomes harder as responsibility increases.

Managers and leaders aren’t just managing their own workload – they’re responding to their team, their manager, their clients, and the wider organisation.

Much of their work is reactive by nature.

There’s also an emotional layer. When someone brings you a problem, it can feel urgent because they are experiencing it as urgent.

That doesn’t always mean it should take priority over everything else.

Without clear boundaries, leaders can end up constantly firefighting, leaving little time for the work that actually improves performance in the long run.

This is where prioritisation overlaps strongly with leadership. Being clear about priorities isn’t just a personal skill – it’s something your team relies on.

The Role of Systems (and Why Willpower Isn’t Enough)

Many people try to prioritise using willpower alone.

They tell themselves to “be more organised” or “focus better”, but nothing really changes.

The issue is that willpower is unreliable under pressure.

Systems, on the other hand, reduce the number of decisions you need to make.

A clear task list, a structured calendar, and agreed priorities mean you’re not constantly starting from scratch each day.

Your calendar should reflect your priorities, not just your meetings.

If important work never appears in your diary, it will always lose out to urgent requests.

This is one of the biggest shifts people make in time management training: treating planning time as legitimate work, not a luxury.

Dealing with the Constant Flow of New Tasks

One reason everything feels urgent is that new work keeps arriving.

A simple but powerful habit is to separate collecting tasks from doing tasks.

Instead of reacting immediately to everything that comes in, capture it first.

Then decide what to do with it at a planned moment.

This creates a small but important pause between request and response.

It also makes it much easier to say things like:

• “I’ll come back to that this afternoon”

• “Let me check my priorities and get back to you”

• “That’s important – but not today”

Protecting your time and setting boundaries is one of the most important parts of effective time management.

When Everything Still Feels Urgent

Sometimes, despite good systems and habits, workload genuinely exceeds capacity.

When that happens, prioritisation becomes a conversation rather than a personal decision.

This is particularly true in leadership roles.

It’s not a failure to say:

• “I can do A and B, but not C as well”

• “If this becomes urgent, something else will need to move”

• “What should take priority here?”

Clear prioritisation often requires clarity from others, not just better personal organisation.

Bringing It All Together

Prioritising when everything feels urgent isn’t about finding the perfect system or becoming superhumanly disciplined.

It’s about:

• getting work out of your head and into a system

• making deliberate choices rather than reacting

• recognising limits

• and using structure to support your decisions

When prioritisation improves, people often notice:

• lower stress

• better focus

• more meaningful progress

• and a greater sense of control over their work

That doesn’t mean work becomes easy – but it does become more manageable.

Final Thoughts

If everything feels urgent, that’s usually a signal, not a personal flaw.

It’s a sign that priorities need clarifying, systems need strengthening, or expectations need resetting.

Small changes in how you capture, plan, and review your work can have a surprisingly big impact.

Prioritisation isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things at the right time, and letting go of the rest.

This is something I explore in more depth in my time management training, as well as in my Outlook and Microsoft To Do course. These sessions focus on building simple, practical systems that work in real jobs, not idealised ones.

If you’d like to find out more, you can explore the relevant courses or get in touch for an informal chat to see how I can you or your team manage your time better.