# Mere urgency effect The mere urgency effect is our tendency to choose tasks that *feel* urgent over tasks that are more important, even when the important ones clearly pay more. Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee documented it in 2018 across five experiments. The key word is "mere". There are good reasons to do urgent things first: they might really expire, they might be easier, or they might pay off sooner. The researchers controlled for all of those. Participants still picked the objectively worse option when it carried a spurious sense of urgency, such as a short, arbitrary time limit. In other words, they broke a basic rule of rational choice (never prefer an option that is worse on every count) just because one task looked like it was about to expire. Why it matters: this is the mechanism behind days that are full but unproductive. Notifications, "quick" requests and artificial deadlines win against deep, important work, not because they matter more, but because they feel time-bound. Tools that force you to separate urgency from importance, like the [[Eisenhower Matrix]], exist precisely because our default judgment mixes them up. ## References - Zhu, M., Yang, Y., & Hsee, C. K. (2018). The mere urgency effect. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(3), 673-690. https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucy008 ## Related - [[Eisenhower Matrix]] - [[Decision fatigue]] - [[Parkinson's Law]] - [[Context switching]] - [[Deep work]] - [[Cognitive biases]]