What is a sense of urgency? A true sense of urgency is when people think that actions on critical issues are needed now. A sense of urgency is not, “I must have an operations meeting today,” but it is, “We must have an operations meeting today, and the meeting must accomplish something important.” The first example would be like having a morning huddle with everyone reporting, but no action plan to make today successful. Before you can truly create a sense of urgency, you must first understand the opposite of urgency.

I am going to put $86,400 into your bank account every day for you to spend any way you wish. However, it will carry no balance over from day to day. Every day, the bank will delete whatever part you failed to use. What would you do? Withdraw every cent? See, each of us has a bank account just like this. It’s the bank of time, because every morning, we are credited with 86,400 seconds. Every night, the bank of time writes off, as a loss, whatever amount of this time we failed to use. It will not carry over any balance, and it will not allow any overdrafts.