Every business contains two kinds of work. One is urgent and produces visible results inside weeks. The other is slow, compounds over years, and never announces itself. Royston G King argues that any organisation holding both will sacrifice the second without ever deciding to. Here he explains why, and what he does about it.
Royston G King has spent close to a decade advising founders, and he says the pattern is close to universal. It appears in firms of every size, in every sector, and it rarely results from a bad decision. It results from an absence of decisions.
King began working in digital marketing while studying business administration at the University of Southern California and founded his own firm in 2018. Named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Monaco list, he has advised more than 1,000 clients across over 100 industries in markets including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Australia.
“Urgent work wins every argument about where people go this week,” said Royston G King. “Not because anyone thinks it is more important. Because it is due Thursday and the other thing is due eventually. Six months later you look up and nobody has touched the long-horizon work at all, and no meeting ever happened where that was agreed.”
The two categories differ in more than timing. Urgent work produces attributable results, so the people doing it can demonstrate their contribution. Patient work produces outcomes that arrive later and are difficult to trace to any specific effort. When a firm is deciding where to invest, the measurable side wins on the strength of its measurability rather than its value.
“That is the part founders miss,” said Royston G King. “It is not that they undervalue the slow work in principle. Ask anyone and they will tell you it matters. The problem is structural. You have put two things that cannot be compared into one queue, and the queue resolves it every time in favour of whatever can be counted.”
King’s response has been to separate them structurally rather than to resolve the argument each week. Work with fundamentally different time horizons, in his view, should not share a resource pool, because sharing one settles the question in advance.
“You have put two things that cannot be compared into one queue, and the queue resolves it every time.” Royston G King
He has applied the same reasoning to his own ventures, keeping work with different rhythms operationally distinct even where the underlying capability overlaps. The arrangement costs more in overhead, which he acknowledges directly.
“Two of anything means two sets of cost and my attention split rather than concentrated,” said Royston G King. “I would not pay that for two things that were basically the same work with different names. It is only worth it when the timelines genuinely cannot coexist.”
The pattern extends beyond resource allocation. King has argued that the same dynamic explains why firms consistently underinvest in the things that determine their position five years out, including documentation, training, and the systems that let work be done consistently rather than heroically.
“Nobody schedules the thing that prevents a problem,” said Royston G King. “You only get credit for handling the problem. So the preventive work sits there being obviously sensible and never getting done, and then a year later everyone is very busy handling something that did not have to happen.”
The remedy he suggests is unglamorous, which he says is characteristic of the whole category. Patient work needs its own protected time, its own owner, and a review cadence that matches its horizon rather than the calendar. A firm reviewing long-horizon investments monthly will conclude they are not working, since almost nothing visible happens in a month.
“You cannot judge a five-year investment on a thirty-day report,” said Royston G King. “But that is the report that exists, so that is what people use, and then they cancel the thing three months in and conclude it was a bad idea.”
King has said the founders who handle this well tend to be the ones who made the separation early, before either side of the business was under real pressure. Doing it during a difficult quarter is considerably harder, because that is precisely the moment when the urgent side has the strongest claim on every available hour and the argument for patience sounds like an argument for ignoring a fire.
