Dermot Crowley – Urgent!: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Urgent!: Strategies to Control Urgency, Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity
• Author: Dermot Crowley
• Genre: Business & Economics, Self-Help & Personal Development
• Published Year: 2018
• Publisher: Wiley
• Language: English

Audio Summary

Synopsis

In today’s technology-driven workplace, everything feels urgent—but is it really? Productivity expert Dermot Crowley reveals that unnecessary urgency is toxic, causing stress, burnout, and inefficiency. Through his practical “Urgency Playbook,” Crowley teaches readers to distinguish between productive urgency that drives results and unproductive urgency that derails your day. With actionable strategies and insights backed by research, this book shows how to leverage urgency strategically, cut through the noise of constant demands, and achieve a healthier balance between responsiveness and effectiveness. Whether you’re drowning in “urgent” emails or struggling with workplace anxiety, Crowley offers a roadmap to reclaim control, reduce stress, and genuinely increase your productivity.

Key Takeaways

• Not all urgency is created equal—learn to distinguish between productive urgency (important and time-sensitive) and unproductive urgency (fake or avoidable distractions)
• Implement the “Urgency Playbook” principles, including “don’t cry wolf” and “use urgency with care” to protect your time and others’
• Develop a proactive mindset by planning ahead, prioritizing importance over urgency, and doing things right the first time
• Recognize that constant interruptions cost up to 20 minutes of recovery time, making fake urgency extremely expensive to productivity
• Create organizational change by establishing clear urgency standards and respecting colleagues’ time and workflow

My Summary

The Urgency Epidemic That’s Killing Our Productivity

I’ll be honest—when I first picked up Dermot Crowley’s “Urgent!”, I thought I’d found yet another productivity book telling me to work harder and faster. Boy, was I wrong. This book actually does the opposite, and that’s exactly what makes it brilliant.

We’ve all been there. You sit down Monday morning with a carefully planned to-do list, ready to tackle that important project. Then the emails start flooding in—each one marked “URGENT” in bright red letters. Your phone buzzes with Slack notifications. A colleague pops by your desk with a “quick question” that derails your next hour. By lunchtime, you haven’t touched your actual priorities, and by 5 PM, you’re exhausted, stressed, and wondering where the day went.

According to research Crowley cites from the 2018 Journal of Applied Psychology, 40% of Americans experience anxiety during their workday, and a staggering 72% say it affects both their work and personal lives. These aren’t just numbers—they represent millions of people feeling like chickens running around without heads, as Crowley colorfully puts it.

What struck me most about this book is Crowley’s central insight: the problem isn’t urgency itself, but our inability to distinguish between different types of urgency. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes—we’ve been conditioned to treat everything labeled “urgent” as genuinely urgent, even when it’s not.

Unmasking Fake and Avoidable Urgency

Crowley introduces a framework that completely changed how I think about my workday. He identifies two types of unproductive urgency that drain our energy and derail our productivity: fake urgency and avoidable urgency.

Fake urgency comes in two flavors—self-inflicted and external. Self-inflicted fake urgency happens when you react to something that wasn’t actually urgent. Maybe you see an email notification and immediately drop everything to respond, even though it could have waited until your designated email time. I’m guilty of this constantly, and Crowley’s research hit home: even a brief interruption takes up to 20 minutes to fully recover from. Twenty minutes! That means if you’re interrupted just three times in an hour, you’ve essentially lost that entire hour.

External fake urgency is even more insidious. We all know that colleague who marks everything as urgent, escalating from “urgent” to “URGENT” to “REALLY URGENT” in a series of emails. They’ve learned that being loud gets results. But here’s the thing—by giving in to these demands, we’re rewarding and perpetuating this behavior. We’re training people that crying wolf works.

Then there’s avoidable urgency—situations that become urgent only because of poor planning, procrastination, disorganization, or overcommitting. This one stung because I recognized myself immediately. How many times have I created urgency for my team because I put something off until the last minute? How often has my poor time management turned someone else’s Tuesday into a fire drill?

The Real Cost of Constant Urgency

The technology-driven workplace has created an environment where we’re always connected, always available, and always expected to respond immediately. This constant state of urgency isn’t just annoying—it’s genuinely harmful. Crowley doesn’t pull punches about the consequences: stress, burnout, physical and mental health issues, missed deadlines, costly rework, and employee attrition.

In my own work running Books4soul.com, I’ve experienced this firsthand. There have been periods where I felt I needed to respond to every comment, every email, every social media mention immediately. The result? I was busy all day but accomplished nothing meaningful. The quality of my writing suffered. My creativity dried up. And ironically, my responsiveness didn’t even improve my relationships with readers—it just set unrealistic expectations.

What Crowley helps us understand is that urgency has become synonymous with anything slightly time-sensitive, regardless of actual importance. The Oxford English Dictionary defines urgency as “importance requiring swift action,” but we’ve dropped the “importance” part. We’re treating everything as urgent, which means nothing is truly urgent—and nothing truly important gets done.

The Urgency Playbook: A Better Way Forward

The heart of Crowley’s book is what he calls the Urgency Playbook—ten principles and strategies for managing urgency effectively. While the summary I read only covers a few of these, they’re powerful enough to transform how you work.

Principle One: Don’t Cry Wolf

This principle is beautifully simple: don’t label something as urgent if it’s not. Save urgency for when it’s truly important, time-critical, and unavoidable. Crowley suggests imagining an “urgency token system” where you get five urgent requests per month. When you run out, that’s it—unless you want your colleagues to lose all respect for your judgment.

I love this framework because it forces you to be strategic. If you only had five urgent tokens this month, would you really use one on that email about next quarter’s planning meeting? Probably not. You’d save them for genuine emergencies—the client crisis, the broken system that’s costing money by the hour, the time-sensitive opportunity that won’t wait.

This principle alone could revolutionize workplace communication. Imagine if everyone in your organization adopted this mindset. The signal-to-noise ratio would improve dramatically. When something was actually marked urgent, people would pay attention because they’d know it mattered.

Principles Two and Three: Use Urgency With Care and Avoid Creating Unnecessary Urgency for Others

These related principles emphasize developing a proactive work style—one that maximizes benefit and minimizes harm to yourself and others. This is where Crowley shifts from defensive strategies (protecting yourself from urgency) to offensive ones (not inflicting urgency on others).

No matter your role in an organization, your thoughtless actions can throw a wrench into someone else’s day. Maybe you’re not the boss, but you can still create urgency for colleagues by failing to plan ahead, by procrastinating on your part of a shared project, or by sending unclear requests that require multiple rounds of clarification.

Crowley outlines several mindsets that support proactive work:

Plan ahead. The old saying “failing to plan is planning to fail” applies to both work and personal life. When you plan ahead, you give yourself and others the gift of time—time to think, time to do quality work, time to handle unexpected issues without panic.

Pay it forward. Consider the needs of your colleagues. Are you working in a way that makes their lives easier or harder? When you send that request, are you giving them enough context and lead time? Or are you creating urgency for them because of your poor planning?

Do it right the first time. This mindset has saved me countless hours. Rushing leads to mistakes, which leads to rework, which creates more urgency down the line. As the old carpentry saying goes, “measure twice, cut once.” It might feel like you don’t have time to slow down, but you’ll actually save time by being thorough initially.

Prioritize by importance, not urgency. This is perhaps the most challenging mindset shift. Our brains are wired to respond to urgency—it triggers our fight-or-flight response. But urgency and importance are not the same thing. The important work—the strategic thinking, the relationship building, the creative projects—rarely feels urgent until it’s too late.

Minimize procrastination. Crowley acknowledges that procrastination often happens when tasks are time-consuming, complex, or lack external pressure. The key is finding ways to mobilize yourself before the task becomes urgent. Break big projects into smaller pieces. Create artificial deadlines. Find an accountability partner. Whatever works for you.

Productive Urgency: The Good Kind

Here’s where Crowley’s framework gets really interesting. He’s not anti-urgency—he’s anti-unproductive urgency. There’s a third category: productive urgency, which involves issues that couldn’t be planned for and genuinely require swift action.

Crowley uses great examples: a dream opportunity with an application deadline tomorrow, or a regulatory investigation requiring an immediate report. This type of urgency can create amazing traction and momentum. It focuses energy, cuts through bureaucracy, and drives results.

The comparison to ice cream is perfect. Urgency is easy to consume, addictive, and might ruin your appetite for the important things—like ice cream before dinner. But just as ice cream has its place (dessert after a good meal), so does urgency. The key is being selective and strategic about when you indulge.

In my experience, the best teams and organizations have mastered this balance. They have a baseline state of calm, focused productivity. But when genuine urgency arises, they can shift gears quickly and effectively because they haven’t exhausted themselves responding to fake urgency all day.

Applying These Principles to Modern Work Life

So how do we actually implement Crowley’s insights in our daily work? Here are some practical applications I’ve found helpful:

Email Management

Stop using “urgent” in subject lines unless you’re using one of your five monthly tokens. Better yet, establish clear communication standards with your team about what constitutes urgency. Create a shared understanding that “urgent” means “needs a response within two hours” while “important” means “needs a response today.” This simple distinction can dramatically reduce unnecessary stress.

I’ve also started batching my email responses rather than reacting immediately to every notification. I check email three times daily—morning, after lunch, and before end of day. This alone has probably saved me hours of recovery time from interruptions.

Calendar Blocking

Protect time for important, non-urgent work by blocking it on your calendar. Treat these blocks as seriously as you would a meeting with your CEO. When someone asks if you’re available during that time, the answer is no—you have a commitment. The commitment just happens to be to yourself and your most important work.

Project Planning

Build buffer time into project plans. If you think something will take two weeks, plan for three. This buffer absorbs the unexpected without creating avoidable urgency. It also allows for the kind of thoughtful, quality work that’s impossible when you’re constantly in crisis mode.

Communication Norms

Have explicit conversations with your team about urgency. What does “urgent” mean in your context? When is it okay to interrupt someone? What’s the expected response time for different types of requests? These conversations feel awkward at first, but they prevent countless future conflicts and misunderstandings.

Self-Reflection

At the end of each week, review the “urgent” items you dealt with. How many were genuinely urgent? How many were fake or avoidable? What patterns do you notice? This reflection helps you identify sources of unproductive urgency and develop strategies to address them.

The Organizational Dimension

While Crowley’s book focuses heavily on individual strategies, there’s an important organizational dimension to urgency culture. If you’re a leader, you have enormous influence over whether urgency is productive or destructive in your team or company.

Leaders who model calm, thoughtful decision-making create cultures where people feel safe to prioritize important work over merely urgent work. Leaders who reward firefighting and crisis management create cultures of perpetual urgency where planning ahead is seen as naive.

I’ve noticed this in the blogging and content creation world too. Some platforms and algorithms reward constant posting and immediate responses, creating a culture of urgency that leads to burnout. Others reward quality and consistency, allowing creators to work more sustainably.

The question for leaders is: What are you rewarding? If you praise the person who stays late to fix a problem they could have prevented with better planning, you’re rewarding avoidable urgency. If you praise the person who anticipated problems and prevented them, you’re rewarding proactive work.

Limitations and Considerations

While I found Crowley’s framework incredibly valuable, it’s worth noting some limitations. First, not everyone has equal power to control urgency in their work lives. If you’re in a junior position, you may have limited ability to push back on fake urgency from senior colleagues or clients. The strategies still help, but systemic change requires buy-in from leadership.

Second, some industries and roles genuinely operate in high-urgency environments. Emergency medicine, crisis communications, and certain client services come to mind. For these contexts, Crowley’s framework still applies, but the baseline level of legitimate urgency is simply higher. The goal isn’t to eliminate urgency but to eliminate unnecessary urgency.

Third, the book (at least from what I’ve seen in the summary) could benefit from more discussion of the psychological and emotional dimensions of urgency. Why do we find it so hard to resist urgency, even when we know it’s fake? How do we manage the anxiety that comes with letting “urgent” requests wait? These deeper questions deserve attention.

Comparing Approaches to Productivity

Crowley’s approach to urgency complements other productivity frameworks I’ve encountered. It pairs beautifully with Stephen Covey’s time management matrix from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” which distinguishes between urgent/important, urgent/not important, not urgent/important, and not urgent/not important tasks. Crowley essentially provides strategies for dealing with the urgent/not important quadrant—the area where fake and avoidable urgency lives.

It also aligns with Cal Newport’s “Deep Work,” which emphasizes protecting time for focused, cognitively demanding work. Newport argues that deep work is increasingly valuable and increasingly rare. Crowley explains why it’s rare: we’re constantly being pulled into shallow, reactive work by fake urgency.

Where Crowley adds unique value is in his focus on the interpersonal and organizational dimensions of urgency. It’s not just about managing your own time—it’s about changing how teams and organizations communicate about and respond to urgency. This systemic perspective is less common in productivity literature and more valuable because of it.

Questions Worth Pondering

As I reflected on Crowley’s ideas, several questions emerged that I’m still wrestling with:

How much of our urgency addiction is about avoiding the discomfort of important but difficult work? It’s easier to respond to urgent emails than to tackle that challenging strategic project. Are we using urgency as a form of productive procrastination?

What would change in your organization if everyone adopted the urgency token system? Would some people run out of tokens by mid-month? Would others discover they rarely need to use urgency at all? What would this reveal about your organizational culture?

In a world that moves faster every year, is the answer really to slow down? Or is it to be more selective about where we apply speed? Crowley seems to suggest the latter—that strategic urgency is powerful precisely because it’s rare and focused.

Finding Your Own Balance

Reading “Urgent!” has made me much more conscious of my relationship with urgency. I catch myself now when I’m about to mark something as urgent, asking: “Is this really one of my five tokens for the month?” I’m more thoughtful about how my requests and deadlines affect others. And I’m getting better at distinguishing between the urgency that drives progress and the urgency that drives me crazy.

The ultimate goal isn’t to eliminate urgency—it’s to reclaim it as a tool rather than letting it be a tyrant. When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. When we’re selective and strategic about urgency, it becomes powerful again.

For anyone feeling overwhelmed by the constant demands of modern work, Crowley’s framework offers a practical path forward. It’s not about working harder or faster. It’s about working smarter by distinguishing between urgency that serves you and urgency that sabotages you.

I’d love to hear your experiences with workplace urgency. What strategies have you found helpful? What challenges do you face in implementing more proactive work habits? Drop a comment below and let’s continue this conversation. After all, building better work cultures is something we can only do together.