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Urgent vs. Important: A Practical Guide for Research Administrators

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Sarah Milligan, MPA, CRA August 21, 2026
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Introduction

If the ping of an email notification sounds more like an alarm siren, you might need to re-evaluate the way you prioritize your workday.

In research administration, urgency is the background noise of the job. A proposal deadline is approaching, an investigator needs a quick answer, a sponsor update changes the plan, and your inbox keeps filling up while you’re still trying to finish the work you started that morning. By the end of the day, you may have answered questions, solved problems, joined meetings, and kept things moving, but you find that only a few items are crossed off your to-do list.

When everything arrives with the same level of pressure, it is difficult to tell what truly needs your attention now and what simply feels urgent because it landed in front of you. This article explores why that happens and how a few simple changes can help you respond with more intention instead of reacting to everything the same way.

Why Our Brains Treat Everything Like an Emergency

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report highlights one of the biggest contributors to this feeling of urgency. According to the report, interruptions from emails, pings, and meetings come every 2 minutes. And that’s just during the workday. If you add in the chats, messages, and even meetings outside of the core work hours, employees are interrupted up to 275 times per day.

Our brains are wired to notice interruption. So, each disruption creates a small demand for attention. In the moment, the brain often reads the interruption as something that we need to react to immediately.

There is both an actual cost and a perceived cost to every interruption. The actual cost is the time it takes to stop one line of thinking, switch to another, and then get back to where you left off. Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has described this cost in practical terms: in one workplace study, it took an average of just over 23 minutes to refocus on a task once interrupted. The perceived cost is the pressure the interruption creates in the moment: the feeling that someone is waiting, something may go wrong, or the request must be handled immediately. Together, those two costs teach the brain to treat each incoming message as a potential emergency, even when the work itself may not be urgent.

In research administration, urgency can be especially difficult to evaluate because so much work involves supporting other people’s deadlines. Investigators, department administrators, sponsors, compliance offices, and institutional leadership may all have competing priorities. As a result, research administrators often become the point where every urgent request converges, even when those requests are not equally important.

So, what can we do about it?

The challenge is not eliminating interruptions. That’s unrealistic. The goal is to create a brief pause between the interruption and your response, giving yourself enough time to decide whether the situation truly requires immediate action.

Before You React, Ask Three Questions

Instead of immediately answering the email, accepting the meeting invitation, or stopping what you’re doing, pause long enough to ask yourself three quick questions.

1. What happens if I don’t do this today? – This question helps separate true urgency from perceived urgency.

Some work truly cannot wait. Deadline-driven tasks such as proposal submissions and reporting requirements often require immediate action. But many requests only feel urgent because they’re unexpected or because someone else is experiencing time pressure.

Pausing to determine the difference helps reduce the pressure to treat every request as an emergency.

2. Who is waiting on me? – Sometimes we feel obligated to respond immediately simply because someone has asked us for something. We need to think about who is impacted and how much our response (and response time) will affect them.

Is someone unable to move forward with important, deadline-driven work without your response? Or would a response later this afternoon be perfectly reasonable?

Putting requests into perspective instead of reacting to them equally is an important step in managing the workday.

3. What are the actual consequences? – This may be the most important question of all. You need to ask yourself what happens if this task isn’t completed immediately.  Not what might happen. Not what someone fears will happen. What actually happens?

Sometimes the answer is significant. Other times, the consequence is simply that someone waits a few more hours for a response.

A Simple Framework for Making Better Decisions: The Eisenhower Matrix

Those three questions outlined above are helpful because they force a pause, but over time, it also helps to have a simple framework for sorting the work in front of you.

Every day brings a steady stream of emails, phone calls, meetings, and requests, with each one competing for your attention. Many of them arrive with a sense of urgency, whether it’s explicit or implied. Over time, it becomes easy to assume that if something feels urgent, it must also be important. But urgency and importance are not the same thing.

Urgency is about time. It demands immediate attention and often comes with the pressure to act quickly. Importance is about impact. Important work contributes to long-term goals, strengthens operations, or fulfills critical responsibilities. While some tasks are both urgent and important, many are only one or the other.

Learning to distinguish between the two is one of the most effective ways to reduce unnecessary stress and make more intentional decisions throughout the workday.

One tool for making that distinction is the Eisenhower Matrix. Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, helped popularize the framework after drawing inspiration from a quote in a speech given by President Dwight D. Eisenhower: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The matrix uses that distinction to help you decide what to do now, what to schedule, what to delegate, and what may not need to be done at all.

The matrix helps us to evaluate work based on two characteristics:

  • Is it urgent?
  • Is it important?

Rather than thinking about four complicated categories, think about the four actions they represent.

  • Do – If something is both urgent and important, it deserves your immediate attention.
  • Decide – If it’s important but doesn’t need to happen today, intentionally decide when you’ll do it before it becomes urgent.
  • Delegate – If the work needs to be done but doesn’t require your expertise or attention, consider whether someone else or an improved process could accomplish it.
  • Delete – If the task adds little value and doesn’t contribute meaningfully to your work, ask whether it needs to be done at all.

Each task may not be perfectly categorized, and the categories may even change throughout the day. But the goal is to create enough space between receiving a request and responding to it so that you can make an intentional decision instead of an automatic one.

A Real-World Example

Imagine a principal investigator emails at 3:45 p.m. with the subject line “URGENT budget revision needed today.” The message says the sponsor asked for an updated budget before the proposal can move forward for funding, but the email does not include a deadline, the specific changes requested, or whether the submission window is closing that day. The word “urgent” naturally creates pressure to stop everything and respond right away.

Before reacting, pause and ask the three questions. What happens if this is not completed today? Who is waiting on the revision? What are the actual consequences? Then determine what the actual deadline is before deciding how to respond. That may mean rereading the sponsor’s request, checking the solicitation or submission portal, looking for any stated cutoff time, and asking the PI a few specific follow-up questions.

If the sponsor deadline is truly that afternoon and the PI cannot proceed without the revised budget, this is both urgent and important, so it belongs in the “Do” category. But if the sponsor simply asked for changes soon and the deadline is later in the week, the better response may be to acknowledge the request, confirm the actual deadline, and schedule focused time to complete the revision without unnecessarily derailing other priority work. In other words, the goal is not to ignore the PI’s urgency; it is to clarify whether the urgency is driven by a real external deadline or by understandable pressure in the moment.

Small Shifts Make a Big Difference

Learning to distinguish urgency from importance isn’t something that is going to happen overnight. Developing the habit of pausing before reacting takes time and consistent practice.

Small shifts make a big difference because they change how we respond to the pressure we face every day. Pausing before reacting, asking what actually needs to happen today, and sorting work by urgency and importance makes for a more manageable workload. The work won’t disappear, but it becomes easier to see which requests truly need attention now and which ones can wait.

Sometimes the most productive thing we can do is create just enough space to decide what actually deserves our attention.

Managing urgency is only one part of building a sustainable career in research administration. For additional perspectives on reducing stress, improving productivity, and supporting long-term wellbeing, explore CITI Program’s webinar, Work-Life Balance in Research Administration.

Sources

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