Why Everything Feels Urgent as a Founder, and How to Solve It

I have worked from a laptop for more than ten years. First as a freelancer juggling marketing clients, then as the owner of a twelve-person agency, and now as the founder of DonnaPro. In every one of those roles the same feeling followed me: that everything was urgent, all at once. I still catch myself in it. What changed is that I stopped treating urgency as a fact about my work and started treating it as a signal about the way my work was organised.

The feeling is not only in your head, and it is not a personal weakness. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found that the average busy professional is now interrupted every two minutes (opens in a new tab) by a meeting, an email or a notification, and receives around 117 emails and 153 chat messages on a typical day. For a founder, who sits at the centre of nearly every decision, the volume is higher and each interruption carries more weight.

The damage is not the two minutes. It is the recovery. Gloria Mark (opens in a new tab), professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has spent two decades measuring attention at work. In her 2023 book Attention Span she reports that the average time people now hold focus on a single screen before switching has fallen to about 47 seconds. Run a founder’s day on pure reaction and you are not working in hours. You are working in 47-second fragments, each one followed by a climb back to where you were.

This article is about why that happens, and what actually solves it. The short version is that urgency is a sequencing problem before it is a time problem, and the real solution ends in delegation. I will give you the frameworks I use myself, and then the part most founders avoid: handing the reactive layer to someone whose job is to carry it. If you want the companion piece on structuring your week, we cover it in detail in our time management strategy for CEOs.

Most of what feels urgent is not urgent

Most of what feels urgent is not actually urgent. It is simply unscheduled.

When work is not planned, every incoming request competes for the same open space, so all of it arrives wearing the same red label. The request that genuinely cannot wait and the request that merely feels pressing look identical in an unmanaged day, because there is no structure to tell them apart.

I run a simple test on myself whenever I feel the pull. I ask: is this truly urgent, or am I making it urgent in my head? Then, if a real deadline is involved, I ask the other person directly whether it can move. In my experience, about nine times out of ten the answer is yes. Most timelines are more flexible than they first appear. Most pressure is imagined, or it is the product of a boundary I never set.

Two older ideas explain why this happens. The first is the self-fulfilling prophecy, defined by the sociologist Robert Merton in 1948: a false belief that drives the behaviour which makes it come true. Tell yourself you have no time, often enough, and you will act as though it is true, skipping the very planning that would have given you time. The second is Parkinson’s Law, Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s observation that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Give a task an open-ended as soon as possible and it will sprawl across your whole week. Give it a defined slot and it contracts to fit. A founder who never sequences the week hands every task an open-ended deadline, which is the same as sending every task to the urgent pile.

Urgency is a sequencing problem, not a time problem

You do not solve urgency by finding more hours. You solve it by deciding the order of your work before the day begins.

Your calendar is your master. If a task that moves the business is not written into it, the day-to-day noise will take its place, every time. So I block the high-value work exactly as I would block a client meeting, and I protect it just as hard. Here is the sequence I run.

Schedule deep work first. Deep work, the term is Cal Newport’s, is focused and uninterrupted work on one high-value task: fixing a client system, building an automation that saves hours every week, writing a real strategy rather than skimming the surface. I schedule at least two sessions a week, around two hours each, ideally before noon. Nobody on my team used to put these in their calendar. Meetings were scheduled, training was scheduled, deep work was nowhere. That absence is exactly where reactivity grows.

Name your reactive blocks on purpose. The goal is not to never be reactive. That is impossible, and pretending otherwise is why most time systems collapse. The goal is to decide when you are reactive. I mark specific windows for email, messages and calls. Inside a deep-work block, communication is closed: no inbox, no chat, nothing. Outside it, I let the reactivity happen on my terms.

Work in focused sprints. I use a modified version of the Pomodoro technique: 50 minutes of focused work, then a break of five to ten minutes. The 50 minutes are protected like a meeting. This matters because switching tasks is not free. One study in Harvard Business Review (opens in a new tab) found that people toggle between different applications and websites around 1,200 times on an average day, and that the seconds spent reorienting after each switch add up to several hours a week. A focused sprint is designed to avoid that hidden tax.

Plan tomorrow before you close today. This is the single habit that changed my days most. If I do not plan the next day before I finish the current one, the next day is almost guaranteed to be a mess. Every evening I check what is on tomorrow, where the deep work sits, and when I am likely to be pulled into reaction.

Protect your sleep, because it is the first domino. When I sleep badly, my focus, mood and self-control all drop, and I spend the whole next day compensating. That compensation is reactivity. Sleep is not a wellness extra. It is the base the whole sequence stands on.

None of this requires more time. It requires deciding the order in advance. The full version of this system, including how to audit your own reactive-to-productive ratio, sits in our CEO time management strategy.

The reactive layer does not disappear when you sequence your week. It moves to someone whose job is to hold it.

The reactive layer is the part you delegate

Sequencing eventually hits a wall, because the reactive layer is real work that does not fit inside a founder’s calendar. At that point it has to move to someone else.

You can sequence your own week perfectly and still drown. The inbox keeps filling during your deep-work block. The scheduling still needs doing. The follow-ups still have to be chased. A founder who protects two focus blocks a week while personally triaging all 117 of those daily emails has not removed the firefight. They have only squeezed it into the gaps.

The structural fix is to split your work into two piles and treat them completely differently.

What stays with you: the deep work, the decisions only you can make, the relationships only you hold, and the direction of the business. This is the work that does not delegate, and protecting it is the whole point of the exercise.

What leaves you: the reactive layer. Inbox triage and first-pass replies, calendar and travel, meeting preparation and follow-ups, personal admin, the chasing and the reminding. None of this needs your judgement most of the time. All of it eats your attention if it stays on your desk.

This is why delegation is not a productivity trick bolted on at the end. It is the thing that makes the sequencing hold. Someone has to own the reactive layer so that you do not have to hold it at all. Our full approach, including what to hand over first and how to brief it, is set out in the CEO delegation playbook.

There is an honest limit worth stating. Delegation only reduces urgency if the reactive layer is genuinely handed over, with context, and then left in the other person’s hands. A dedicated assistant who knows your preferences, your clients and your priorities can absorb interruptions before they ever reach you, and can tell real urgency from the manufactured kind on your behalf. A helper you have to re-brief for every task cannot, because the re-briefing is itself another interruption. The difference between those two is the difference between delegation that works and delegation that simply adds a manager’s job to your day.

A founder’s week, sequenced

Put together, the sequence produces a week that looks calm from the outside and feels controlled from the inside.

Every day follows the same shape, and two mornings a week are reserved for deep work before the inbox is ever opened. A typical day looks like this.

The felt result is the important part. Far fewer things reach you wearing the urgent label, because a trusted person has already sorted genuine urgency from the manufactured kind. You are not reacting less because you are working harder. You are reacting less because the structure, and the person inside it, are doing the sorting you used to do yourself, 47 seconds at a time.

Where DonnaPro fits

This is the gap DonnaPro was built to close.

A DonnaPro executive assistant is a dedicated, professionally trained European EA who owns the reactive layer: inbox, calendar, travel, meeting preparation, follow-ups and personal admin. Because each assistant is backed by an account manager, a quality manager and IT support, the quality of the work does not depend on one person having a good day, and continuity does not depend on that person staying. You hand over the reactive layer once, to a managed team, and it stays held.

That is a different model from a single freelancer or a pool of cheap hours, and the pricing reflects a managed European service rather than a task-by-task rate. You can see how a dedicated EA works in practice on our executive assistant overview, and if the first thing you want back is your own time rather than a longer to-do list, our piece on buying back your time is the place to start. If you are not sure you are ready at all, the signals are in our guide on when to hire an executive assistant.

Filip PesekFounder & CEO, DonnaPro

Filip Pesek spent more than seven years building delegation systems the hard way: through trial, error, and eventually a complete rethink of how founders should work with assistants. Before DonnaPro, he founded Spark, a marketing agency, and wrote the bestselling book Pisma za Leona. DonnaPro grew directly from the systems Filip developed for himself, and later shared with the founders and CEOs who kept asking how he managed to work the way he did. He writes about delegation, founder leverage, and building businesses that do not depend on the person at the top holding everything together.