urgency culture

When Did Everything Become So Damn Urgent?

I feel like we've lost sight of what "urgent" really means.

Input for a report? Due in two days. The briefing note for a senior leader's meeting next week? Due tomorrow. The data for Question Period? Probably already late.

As a leader, I often felt like I could never catch up. Despite being mighty, my team was operating below its full capacity. We couldn't staff our vacant positions while awaiting a funding decision on our program, yet we still had a high volume of work to accomplish. On top of our own responsibilities, we were bombarded with many "urgent" tasks.

When you Google the word "urgent," you see words like "pressing," "acute," "critical," and "desperate." Yet a good proportion of the tasks marked urgent weren't desperately needed in the timeline provided. They weren't critical either.

To put this in a real-world context, imagine if every weather alert that flashed across your phone was marked as "SEVERE" with blazing red warnings. Then imagine opening your phone only to see that the actual forecast didn't align with the warning you received:

Monday: SEVERE: Light breeze with 5km winds

Tuesday: SEVERE: Scattered clouds

Wednesday: SEVERE: Mild temperatures and gentle sunshine

Thursday: SEVERE: Sunshine

Eventually, you would either start to ignore the warnings completely or, worse, suffer from the constant cortisol rushes causing significant stress. After living in this state for too long, when an actual tornado was bearing down on your town, that red alert would just blend in with all the others. You'd be numb, and the genuine emergency would get lost in the noise of everyday "emergencies." Truly critical priorities get buried under an avalanche of artificial emergencies, and the ability to distinguish between what needs immediate attention and what can wait becomes impossible.

Leaders—especially at the middle management level—are encouraged to manage these urgencies. In other words, to read the weather. They're expected to manage their workload, push back when needed, and be the voice for their team. Thankfully, in my experience, my management supported me in doing this. While I agree that this is part of a leader's responsibility, it didn't feel great to always be the person requesting extensions or submitting late work. As I mentioned in my last article, reputation matters.

The reality is that system-level issues won't be fixed file by file. While I believe in grassroots-level changes, when a culture becomes obsessed with urgency, relying on middle management to solve the problem will only result in leaders who are tired, overworked, overwhelmed, and ultimately burned out.

So what needs to change?

We need to hit pause. We need to step back and question what we do and why we do it, especially regarding our more cyclical or routine practices. I know people will panic because there are so many things to do and not enough time, but bear with me.

I would venture to guess that there are at least a couple of processes in your workplace whose origins you might not even know. They've become so ingrained in your culture that no one questions why they're done—the machine just needs to move, so you move.

What would happen if you did something differently? Or didn't do it at all? With the high levels of workplace stress and burnout, isn't it at least worth a discussion?

As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day. It will take small, incremental changes to undo the culture that has been built. But I believe it can be done. With intentional reflection on processes, ruthless prioritization (foreshadowing my next article), and rejection of false urgencies, we can hopefully start to lower everyone's cortisol—at least a little.