The nefarious loss of business urgency

When procrastination costs you a business

Urgency is the currency that keeps your company alive as a leader, and you as a person. And we fail to keep it up more often than not.

The lure is always there to do something else:

• Optimize that idea we implemented 3 months ago

• Slowly building a new untested channel because that might be a good early investment

I have a suspicion that for instance the effort to look for product-market fit is increased the shorter your runway is. While founders understand what their problem is, they just underestimate how serious it is. And some don't like dealing with it, so they look away.

But… why are we this way?

Do we not care enough?

The car is practically still new. Kind of.

Starting to measure “problems”

I’ve tried to lose weight for the better part of the last decade and I’ve tried a lot of things… Keto, Intermittent fasting, exercise, calorie counting, you name it.

And I have an opinion on all of those. They are like frameworks, unlike in business they are frameworks that should bring success in some form or another.

The good thing about losing weight is it’s like company revenue: whether it goes up or down… we know which direction we want.

In 2017 I told 4 of my friends about my woes of losing weight and we thought that maybe we could hold each other accountable over a shared Excel sheet where we all individually track our weight. So we did.

Now I have a data set to look over 7 years of data on what works and what doesn’t. I love analyzing data. So I did:

I lost weight with all these methods. But nothing really stuck in the long term. Was this just the learning? I am constantly bouncing up and down for eternity. Or do I need another framework?

And then it hit me, it’s all about urgency on two dimensions:

1. There is a pattern to when I started to lose weight. In other words, when I saw the urgency to do something.

2. And what drives my behavior to become sloppy, or in other words, when my sense of urgency dropped.

Obvious Urgency

In the case of my weight loss, the urgency that drop me over the years to do something was simple: Something prompted me to step on the scale and I was shocked. How could I have gained that much weight… I don’t feel well, that’s enough. Time to get disciplined.

And thus some kind of framework followed like intermittent fasting recently.

The more interesting bit though is when I started to regain weight and “lose” my way.

In business, this is the 6-12 months before your runway starts to melt away. “Oh oh, I have to do something.”

Losing visibility over your problem space

You might say, “Well maybe you reached your goal and you just fell out of it?” and that would be in most cases correct. But there is one important variable missing here that I started to notice when looking at the data. And it applies 1:1 to the patterns I see in a business context:

The number of measurements… me stepping on the scale started to drop way before that. I was still in the habit but I felt like I have it under control.

It’s not so much that I lose my sense of urgency, I started to lose visibility and stopped holding myself accountable as a result of it.

We call dealing with problems in a continuous matter “discipline”. Everyone knows it’s the thing that champions are made out of, but apparently, you cannot just will it into existence.

I certainly can’t. But I learned over the years what makes me tick and how I can maintain discipline but define very clearly a line in the sand that I will not cross: