about my sense of urgency.

When I was a publisher, I placed a high value on my sense of urgency. Everyone in my book of “those who are good at this” had a sense of urgency about the work we did. We tried to trim any schedule while still delivering top-notch quality.

Urgency is a highly personal relationship between a person and the work. It is a decision on how quickly something needs to be done in order to be done well.

Urgency means meeting the schedule with outstanding work.
Urgency means coming in early so that the next guy has more time to do what he needs to do.
Urgency means focusing on the task at hand, focusing to do it well on the first and only try.

When you work on unrealistic schedules that drive revenues that support your paycheck, urgency is value that is worth cultivating.

I taught my team in publishing that urgency is a merit skill.

Then I came online. I found it unfortunate and frustrating that folks didn’t seem to have a sense of urgency. I heard my urgent voice saying why don’t folks care that things slip and take longer than they need to?

Then I looked again at my sense of urgency. I started to realize that I had learned to be urgent about everything. Everything must get done. There were musts and shoulds, where I needed none. When I unpacked the word urgency I found the words responsibility, control, and oh no! . . . oh yes! stress.

Over time, I’ve adjusted my steps to walk when I don’t need to run.

I’m urgent only when time makes a real difference to the outcome.

I wish I had been a blogger before I was a publisher. Having known this would have made me a better manager.

Sometimes I truly do need a sense of urgency Sometimes I truly am better off without one.

We don’t grow at steady pace. Maybe our cells do, but we don’t. We grow in spurts, in leaps and jumps. We grow, often without even knowing.

After 8th grade graduation, I was incredibly hungry. That first year in high school, I was eating twice as much at lunch. It was hard to miss that I was growing. By the end of 9th grade, I had grown three inches in one year. To my mother’s dismay, clothes in stores were too short for me. We started designing and making what I would wear. I grew two more inches the following year.

My son was the same way. When he would start eating two or three times as much, we would know he was growing. We’d get ready to replace his wardrobe. With my son, just as my mother did, I kept marks on the wall to record how tall he was getting.

My son and I get incredibly hungry about learning too.

We’re saturation learners. We go live in the knowledge. We become whatever it is that we want to know. That’s how I became a dancer, a teacher, a publisher, a blogger. That’s how he mastered stop action video, how he became an award-winning webmaster, how he aced the final on game theory.

Benchmarks for learning are there for all of us. While we’re kids in school, we have report cards. They get us to stop for a brief moment. They get us to know what we know now that we didn’t know then. Classes and courses summarize outcomes to remind us of what we’ve picked up while we took them. In traditional jobs, performance appraisals are set up to get us to look at progess.

We need a reminder to reflect on how far we’ve come in living our lives.

Sometimes we’re so busy living, we don’t stop to see how we’ve grown. We especially don’t see the wisdom, knowledge, and experience. We tend to look at ourselves only when things are going wrong.

One incredibly cool part of blogging is that a blog is a record of where we have been.

This weekend I’m going back in time. I’m going on a walk through my very first posts for the distinct purpose of seeing how I’ve grown. Like I used to with my old journals, I bet I’ll find myself answering the person I was when I wrote those posts.

Every now and then, I need to stop on this road. I need to see where I’ve been, to see how I’ve grown, to let go of the myths about myself that I might still be carrying. That’s how I know where I’m going.

That’s how I make sure I haven’t left anything important back where I was.