One of the weird things about being an Engineering Director (ED) is that the stuff that lands on your plate is almost always very important but not urgent. This happens often and is a constant cycle of evaluation. Misjudging urgency or importance can cause a ton of problems for you and your team. Here’s how I think about navigating this.

False Urgency: Burnout’s Best Friend

The first big pitfall is treating non-urgent tasks as urgent. This feels good in the moment—it’s nice to check something off your list or swoop in to save the day—but it doesn’t take long before the cracks start to show. Constantly working in “everything’s on fire” mode will:

  • Burn you out. You can’t sprint forever.
  • Lose you trust. If you call every molehill a mountain, eventually, no one listens when you shout about an actual problem.

I’ve seen this play out too many times. The ED who gets too caught up in false urgency quickly runs out of energy and goodwill. When something truly critical happens, they find themselves too depleted—or ignored entirely.

I feel this a lot and find myself in situations where I have yet to truly evaluate the urgency of a need. I end up solving the problem, but often at the cost of my own sanity, having juggled multiple non-urgent things at once trying to get everything done. When I look back at these things, it’s certainly nice to have completed them, but they seem much less urgent in hindsight.

False Importance: How to Look Like a Fool

Equally bad (and arguably more embarrassing) is treating unimportant things as important. This is a fast track to having your peers think you don’t know what you’re doing.

Imagine elevating a trivial bug or fighting tooth and nail for a low-impact change. Even if you win those fights, it costs you time, energy, and reputation. Worse, when you later need allies for something critical, no one will jump in to help. Your priorities have already proven suspect.

Attributing false importance to a task happens less often to me. Still, again, looking back at some tasks and projects, there are definitely a handful that seemed important at the moment and could have been handled differently and more positively.

So, What Do You Do?

The solution seems uncomplicated, but it takes discipline. Here’s how I’m trying to manage this balance:

  1. Pause and Evaluate
    Before diving in, I ask:
    • Is this actually important? Is this actually urgent?
    • What happens if I don’t handle it right now?
    • When I look back on the work I plan to take on now, will it have been the right thing to focus on?

If the answers don’t point to “yes, this matters, and yes, this needs to happen soon,” it can probably wait.

  1. Communicate Expectations Clearly
    I’ve started using phrases like:
    • “This is important, but we have some time to get it done.”
    • “This needs to be done right away, even though the value isn’t as high as some of our other work.”

These help set the right tone for my peers and my team. Being clear is just the first step; we must then evaluate those projects and tasks against other work, which contributes to their priority. The point is that this opens the dialogue.

  1. Invest in Trust
    If you consistently focus on what’s important—not just what’s loud—you’ll build a reputation for sound judgment. That kind of thing pays off when the stakes are high and you need support.

  2. Audit Regularly
    I want to evaluate my tasks and calendar at least weekly to identify time-wasters and distractions. This evaluation would help clear space for the work that matters. I could improve at this, primarily because the demands on my time from others are great. What I’m beginning to realize is that I need to preemptively decide (by having enough information in advance, which is a separate challenge to solve) what things are important and urgent enough to merit my attention and politely defer, delegate, or decline, with good reasoning, when these requests of my time don’t make muster.

Final Thoughts

In my engineering director role, I constantly balance importance and urgency. Most of the work I handle is important, but it rarely needs to be done right this second. I need to lean into that, stay focused on what truly matters, and avoid the traps of urgency and triviality. I’ll get more done, and my peers will trust me more when it counts.