Many people – myself included – feel urgency at work. The urgency can be manufactured (eg. if you have a deadline), financial (running out of money), or moral (a disaster is impending or ongoing).

I feel great urgency regarding the creation of superintelligence, which I think will certainly happen in the next five years. The question is, what do you do about that?

It turns out that people do not act very well in urgent situations. Asking someone to think about something very quickly typically means that they’ll default to their base instincts, biases, or otherwise avoid taking full stock of a situation.

There’s also the fact that rest matters. Let’s say you’re trying to drive across the US as fast as possible. If you floor it at 130mph the whole way, you’ll possibly get into a crash, get stopped by the cops, or break your vehicle – all of which would slow you down. It makes more sense to go at 70mph and just make sure you are doing that consistently. It also makes sense to stop at gas stations, because you need gas.

Bringing it back to working on urgent things, rest helps you sustain in the long-run. eg. sleep, exercise, doing things other than work mean you have a fresher mind for the journey ahead. It also means you have time to reflect – am I really doing the most important thing?

I generally find this counter-intuitive. If something is extremely urgent, shouldn’t we all be doing something until it’s resolved? That may be true for things on the timeline of 24 hours, but actually, few things are. Even if something has a deadline of two weeks, it’s probably good to take breaks and sleep. All the more so for things that have a shortish timeline (a few months to a few years).

“The tortoise with prudent wisdom hastens slowly.” – Jean de La Fontaine