Urgency
Urgency is attending to a task or undertaking outside the natural flow of life, because there seems to be a potential for losing something irreplaceable if one doesn't. An example is interrupting dinner to answer the phone.. Some things naturally give an aura of urgency, such as phone ring, but most urgency is manufactured by one's reactions and the reactions of others. Urgency has become a social norm. For instance, in a small business, inquiries must be responded to immediately, even after hours. Asynchronous communication like texts and email allow the possibility of acting outside urgency but most people use these to increase the urgency of life.
A crisis is a situation in which doing nothing is not an option. While natural forces may bring a crisis, most crises are egineered by humans trying to remove the option of doing nothing from themselves or others. Crises can become a bad habit, because it removes the need to do the hard thing or the constructive thing, and replaces it with the need to do the quick or stop-gap thing. That is, a crisis orientation, can work as a get-out-of-real-responsibility card.
"First things first" is an expression describing a style of life in which satisfying, vitalizing, and healing activities are given priority, with the understanding that crisis will usually fall away or be easily dealth with from a position of health.