Scarcity
Tunnelling
The urgent crowds out the important
Scarcity: the twin concepts of tunneling and slack
The busier you get, the less the important things get done. This piece argues that is a mechanism rather than bad planning.
What actually happened?
Scarcity narrows attention, and the narrowing has a name: tunneling. The most urgent thing is lit brilliantly, and everything outside the tunnel — the check-up, the insurance, the repayment plan, the call you owe somebody — goes dark. It is not purely a loss; focus inside the tunnel genuinely rescues the emergency. The cost simply lands outside it, and lands late. Their companion idea is slack: with slack, one small accident stays one small accident. Without it, the same accident capsizes you.
The efficiency inside the tunnel is real, and so is the bill
People genuinely work faster and sharper near a deadline. That speed is borrowed: it is drawn from attention that belonged outside the tunnel, and the loan comes due in weeks or in years. Run it as a normal operating mode and every quarter goes on clearing the last one.
The output a deadline forces out of you usually costs a stretch with no check-ups, no replies and no long-term decisions taken at all.
Slack is not waste, it is room to be wrong
Filling the calendar and the account to the last unit looks like maximum efficiency. It is actually setting your tolerance for error to zero. With room, one surprise stays one surprise. Without it the same surprise chains: borrowing, penalties, the real work missed.
An emergency fund you are not allowed to touch is not there for the return. It is there so that one accident does not turn into five.
You fix a tunnel with structure, not with reminders
Reminders fail inside the tunnel, because you did not forget — at that moment you could not see it. What works is moving the important thing somewhere that needs no attention: the automatic payment, the appointment already booked, the schedule somebody else watches for you.
A check-up already booked and already paid for is more reliable than intending to arrange one when things calm down.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: everything lately is firefighting, and nothing important but unurgent has moved at all.
Ask first: which of the things being squeezed out becomes the next fire if it waits? Move that one into a form that does not need you to remember it.
Where it goes wrong: using tunnelling as a reason not to plan; or building so much slack that you stop putting out the fire actually in front of you.
Lines to keep
The urgent is lit up; everything outside the tunnel goes dark.
Slack is not waste. It is room to be wrong.
The same mistake costs the poorer side far more.
Same situation, other people are asking
The work at home genuinely never ends.My day comes in pieces. Is that why nothing deep gets done?I was busy every hour and moved nothing that needed real thought.Everything urgent gets done and nothing important does.There's never enough time · all 7 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.