Urgency 🪓 Importance

When production goes down, chop urgency from importance. 🪓

It’s URGENT to get the system back up and running again. It’s IMPORTANT to fix the root cause, such as a code problem.

If you are simultaneously fixing what’s important and urgent, you’re in for a bad time.

Address urgency first. ↳ Roll back the release and deploy a stable version.

Address importance second. ↳ Now, you can breathe and have time to prepare a proper patch.

This goes against our instinct to fix the actual problem; that’s why it’s helpful to have fire drills and guidelines on how to handle outages.

The same principle applies anytime there’s a fire. Try to find a way to split the two.

Yours,

Taj