Organizing for Urgent

Here’s a useful post from Seth Godin – “Organizing for Urgent”

“There are many ways to prioritize our time and focus, but the easiest and most vivid way is to do the urgent things first.

If we wait until a house plant is sick before we take care of it, though, it’s too late.

Deadlines, loud requests and last-minute interventions are crude forcing functions. They’re inefficient and common.

It’s far more effective to organize for important instead.

We thrive when we do things when we have the most leverage, not when everyone else does. Waiting for trouble means that you’re going to spend your days dealing with trouble.”

Yep.

And that’s true – probably even truer – for legal things too, and it comes in 2 shapes and sizes.

1.      The Drama. Something legal has gone badly wrong. Everyone loves the excitement. Drama. More drama. A lawyer rides in and saves the day. Phew.

2.      Urgent beats Important. When you are in-house counsel for a company, everyone wants you to do what’s urgent. You very rarely get asked to do what’s important because most people don’t get what’s important from a legal perspective. As a result, if you are doing your job properly, you spend a lot of time pushing back on the urgent so that you can do what’s important.

If you are an external lawyer charging by the hour, then you probably don’t care either way. You have a single hourly rate, and you don’t charge differently for urgent vs. important.

Prevention is better than cure. Yes, it’s less dramatic, but it’s cheaper and frees up resources that can bring bigger results for the business.

But prevention doesn’t just happen. You need people with the right mindset. People that see beyond the here and now, that see how the different parts of a business interact, that can do a root cause analysis, and that have a process mentality.

And that’s even rarer in the legal world than it is in the rest of business.

18 February 2025