A young manager in a large organization received a message from his boss at 9.45pm: “Need this urgently tonight.” The task involved revising a presentation for a meeting later that week. Dinner plans were abandoned. Several hours disappeared into updating slides, checking numbers and refining arguments. The deck was emailed shortly before midnight.
Two days later, the meeting was postponed. Nobody mentioned the overnight effort. Nor did anyone seem too concerned that the ‘urgent’ work could suddenly wait.
In another company, a senior executive developed a habit that her team initially found irritating. Whenever someone marked a task as ‘urgent,’ she asked, “What happens if we do this tomorrow?” The answer was often revealing. More often than not, it was “nothing.”
We live in an age that’s deeply attached to urgency. It appears in emails, meetings, instant messages and conversations. Notifications flash, phones vibrate and inboxes overflow with ‘high priority’ requests. Organizations celebrate speed and responsiveness as indicators of performance. Yet, this often conforms with a myth: that constant pressure produces better outcomes.
Genuine emergencies do exist. Critical client issues, regulatory deadlines, cybersecurity breaches or operational failures may require instant attention. Urgency itself is not a problem, but using it as the operational default setting is.
In many organizations, tasks are labelled ‘urgent’ chiefly because of poor planning, unrealistic expectations, weak prioritization or managerial anxiety. Artificial urgency gradually gets embedded in the office culture. It creates a permanent state of pressure that falsely feels productive.
Technology has amplified this tendency. Communication tools have eliminated both delay and distance. Instant messaging has created expectations of instant responses, with the result that the staff spends much of its day reacting.
It creates a vicious cycle of inefficiency. Employees abandon important work to address the latest urgency. As attention shifts, context and momentum are lost. Time is spent flitting between tasks rather than making meaningful progress on anything that calls for uninterrupted work.
The most valuable activities involve strategic thinking, innovation, problem-solving, capability building and relationship development. These are often the first casualties of being in fire-fighting mode. Clients eventually feel the consequences too. Teams focused on internal emergencies find it harder to anticipate needs, improve service quality or deliver consistent experiences. An attempt to accelerate delivery then delivers confusion and disappointment.
There’s an impact on employee well-being too. Most people can put in intense effort if there is a clear purpose and a visible endpoint. A daily crisis, though, is exhausting. Top performers tend to bear the heaviest burden because they are the people most likely to be trusted with urgent work. Ironically, they are also the people most vulnerable to burnout. Their departure is not a surprise.
Something else begins to diminish as well: trust. Employees start asking whether priorities are just reactions and grow sceptical of urgency. Emotional commitment weakens. When everything is treated as urgent, nothing feels genuinely urgent.
As for leaders, many find themselves trapped in a cycle of fire-fighting. Instead of focusing on long-term growth, innovation, talent development, customer strategy and competitive positioning, they sweat the relatively small stuff, with little time left for reflection, perspective and analysis.
It’s fair to posit that decision quality suffers as well. Important calls made under artificial time pressure are more likely to go by shaky assumptions, incomplete information and emotional dispositions. The financial costs are rarely visible in a single quarter, but they accumulate through employee turnover, poor customer experiences, missed opportunities and constant rework.
One of the principal causes of this culture is the widespread use of artificial deadlines. Many are set without a genuine business necessity. They emerge from preferences, assumptions or a desire to create pressure. Employees quickly learn the difference between deadlines that matter and those that merely demand time and energy.
Perhaps the most useful distinction in modern work is between urgency and importance. The strategic aspects that make a difference to outcomes rarely announce themselves as urgent. This may be the central irony of contemporary work. We spend so much time responding to urgent matters that we neglect important ones until they transform into an actual crisis.
For sustainable success, every organization needs all its employees at every level to discern what actually needs to be done, as distinct from what somebody wants done rightaway. It’s about thoughtful prioritization and consistent execution. In a world obsessed with speed, working faster need not amount to a competitive advantage. Knowing what truly deserves attention is what may ultimately count for most.
The authors are, respectively, a corporate advisor, and author of ‘Family and Dhanda’; and lead, private equity and M&A, Nishith Desai Associates.