Don't forget the roof / Urgency and Valuableness
What is valuable is not always urgent... Read more on how we can navigate different choices around valuableness and urgency – and not forget the breaking point (or the roof).
The book Build Your Way - Applying Product Management to Life is out now. Get your copy.
While value is determined by (a perceived) importance, desirability, or usefulness, urgency is related to time sensitivity. It’s a pressure to act quickly in a certain situation or context.
This pressure makes us prioritize what’s urgent, but it’s important to take a step back and think about the value. Not everything that is urgent is valuable. If we only deal with urgent matters, we’ll neglect everything else, and there may be a lot of value in the less urgent things that we will never get to do.
A homeowner who only fixes small, but urgent, household problems may neglect important larger, long-term maintenance – it’s the same with our lives and our larger, long-term goals and projects. There may also come a moment when these large items become urgent, but we don’t have the time or resources anymore for such an undertaking. You may wake up one day and the metaphorical or actual roof needs to be replaced. If you were only focusing on what was urgent at the time and didn’t prepare, you’re in a pickle.
It is important to be aware of the urgency and how it is interconnected with value. There’s a simple but powerful tool for navigating this, called Eisenhower Matrix. It divides our tasks into four quadrants based on importance and urgency: urgent and important, urgent but not important, not urgent but important, and neither urgent nor important. I describe this matrix in more detail in this post on Substack.
Breaking Point
There are cases where a fixed moment in time is decisive. At this point, value drastically decreases or completely perishes. I refer to it as the “breaking point”.
In product management, a feature or solution could become obsolete or stop working in the new circumstances after the breaking point moment. In our life, it can be anything with an expiry date, from food to coupons, software licenses, or event tickets. After a certain point, the value is gone. In the case of the breaking point, it’s like a cliff where the value falls to zero at once, while in other cases it could stagnate or slowly diminish over time.
Another scenario can be related to cost. In product management and decision-making, there’s a concept called cost of delay. Cost of delay refers to value lost due to a task, project, or decision not being executed. It can be a direct cost, such as lost revenue, increased expenses, or fines and penalties, or indirect, such as missed opportunities. The cost of delay could behave in different ways, for instance, it could increase slowly, stagnate or grow exponentially. In the case of the breaking point, the cost of delay goes drastically high at once. In our life, it happens with deadlines. For example, you need to submit an assignment, file taxes or apply for a job by a certain date. Once it’s gone, you’ve missed it. The cost would be failing a class, missing a job opportunity, or paying a penalty for late tax filing.
It’s important to be aware of breaking points and plan accordingly – otherwise, that decisive moment sneaks up on us, and all of a sudden the value is gone or there’s a high cost we need to endure.
The book Build Your Way - Applying Product Management to Life is out now. Get your copy.