Early in my career, while I was working in corporate communications and PR, I was getting myself into a proper state about something at work. I can’t remember exactly what it was… probably something reasonably innocuous, like a document that had to be finished by five o’clock. What I do remember is what a more experienced colleague said to me:
“It’s PR, not ER.”
I’ve never forgotten it, and it’s a pretty good reminder for anyone working in corporate. We’re not in an emergency room, and nobody is going to die because a PowerPoint presentation isn’t finished by lunchtime.
The weird thing is that long after I’d heard that line, I kept getting swept up in all the fake urgency anyway. I felt the jolt when something landed in my inbox marked urgent, and I was always ready to rearrange my day around somebody else’s deadline. Sometimes I passed that same urgency on to other people - including my team, when I became a manager myself.
So why do so many corporate workplaces operate in a permanent state of urgency, even when most of us recognise that much of it is unnecessary? Where does the pressure come from, and how do you work out what’s genuinely urgent?
What a real deadline looks like
To give you some perspective on this, I spent the first few years of my career as a journalist and editor - mostly in weekly and monthly publications, where deadlines are very real things.
For a weekly publication, there was a particular day when everything had to go to print, and a whole chain of events had to happen first. Journalists finished their stories, subeditors edited them, then editors reviewed and approved them. Designers laid out the pages, which were checked and sent to the printers before distribution.
All of that had to happen in a set order, within a set timeframe. You couldn’t decide you needed an extra couple of days because you hadn’t got around to writing or reviewing something. Drop the ball and you could be responsible for a community not getting its newspaper on time. There was a commercial reality, too: in a competitive industry, being a day late could mean missing a story or losing it to a rival publication.
There was a lot of pressure, especially close to deadline. Sometimes a major story broke at the last minute and everyone scrambled to get it in. We all knew that was part of the job, and you understood why the deadline mattered, because you could see exactly what would happen if you missed it.
When everything became “urgent”
When I moved into corporate PR and communications, I expected things to be different. In some ways they were, but oddly enough the sense of urgency was just as intense - and sometimes more so.
Suddenly, everything needed to be done yesterday. A presentation for a meeting next week became a critical deliverable for tomorrow, because the leadership team needed five days to review it. Someone wanted a briefing paper urgently, although nobody seemed sure when it would be used. An executive wanted something reviewed immediately, so whatever else you were working on had to wait, simply because of who was asking.
That being said, corporate PR has important deadlines. If you’re dealing with a major incident or an announcement that has to go out at a particular time, for example, you need to move quickly. I was used to that kind of pressure and it didn’t bother me.
What I found a lot weirder was how often the same urgency applied to routine work. People would get stressed about something that had to be finished by five o’clock, only for it to sit in someone’s inbox for three days. Or you’d rearrange your whole afternoon to meet an urgent request, then find out the meeting it was needed for had been postponed.
There are situations in corporate work where being wrong or being slow has serious consequences. However, I think we can safely say that for much of what we do every day, the urgency is completely out of proportion to what’s at stake.
Confusing responsiveness with being good at your job
Part of the issue here is that somewhere along the way, we started confusing being responsive with being good at our jobs.
Think about the people in your workplace with a reputation for being reliable. They’ve probably gained that reputation because they turn things around at short notice and seem happy to drop everything when somebody needs something. There’s nothing wrong with being responsive, and you certainly don’t want to become a roadblock. But what happens when how quickly you respond begins to matter more than what you’re doing or producing?
Organisational psychologists call this phenomenon workplace telepressure, being the preoccupation with and urge to respond to work messages as quickly as possible. Researchers Larissa Barber and Alecia Santuzzi have linked it to difficulty switching off from work. Crucially, nobody has to tell you to respond immediately. You absorb the expectation just by watching the people around you.
We may even be putting ourselves under more pressure than the people sending those messages intend. In a 2021 paper, Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns looked at non-urgent work emails sent outside normal hours. Across eight studies, they found that recipients consistently overestimated how quickly the sender expected a reply.
So while you might be sitting at home, feeling guilty about an email you haven’t answered, the person who sent it probably doesn’t even expect to hear from you until tomorrow. We’ve create the pressure ourselves, because we’re so used to treating every request as urgent.
How a routine request becomes an emergency
Once responsiveness is tied to commitment, that expectation shapes behaviour across the whole organisation - and hierarchy makes it worse.
Let’s say a senior executive asks for some information or a briefing for an upcoming meeting. They may have no particular expectation about when it’s needed, but by the time that request has passed through a couple of layers of management, it’s become something that absolutely must be done by the end of the day, simply because of who asked.
Intellectually, you might know that you can question unreasonable deadlines, however that’s a lot harder to do when the request comes from somebody with influence over your career, and over whether you have a job at all. We know people are less likely to speak up or challenge decisions when they fear negative consequences. Even if you suspect a deadline is arbitrary, it can feel safer to get on with the work than to ask whether it really needs doing today.
The impact of poor planning
There’s another source of manufactured urgency that will be familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organisation: poor planning.
Let’s say a document goes off for review and sits in someone’s inbox for two weeks. Nobody looks at it, makes a decision or follows up. Then someone remembers it’s needed for a meeting tomorrow, and everybody has to drop what they’re doing to get it finished.
The meeting might be a genuine deadline, and the document might really be required. However, the urgency wasn’t created by the person who received the work at the last minute. It was created by what did or didn’t happen over the previous two weeks. In other words, a deadline can be completely real by the time it reaches you, even though the scramble was avoidable.
This has consequences for the people at the receiving end. There’s a strong link between leader procrastination and employee frustration, which in turn can affect behaviour and job satisfaction. When managers delay decisions or fail to deal with work in good time, other people end up carrying the cost.
When urgent overrides important
Manufactured workplace urgency can also have some less obvious impacts, because it changes how we decide what deserves our attention.
In 2018, researchers Meng Zhu, Christopher Hsee and Yang Yang described what they called the mere-urgency effect in the Journal of Consumer Research. In their experiments, people chose between a task with a deadline and a task with a greater reward, and they sometimes picked the less valuable task simply because it looked more urgent. The research wasn’t conducted specifically in workplaces, but I think the implications are fairly obvious.
Imagine you’re working on a proposal that could be worth a significant amount of money to the business. It needs concentration, and you’ve set aside the afternoon to finish it. Then someone emails asking for some information by four o’clock. It’s a minor request and it probably won’t make much difference either way.
Because it’s marked urgent, you assume it’s important. So you stop working on the proposal and deal with the request, and the work that potentially matters much more gets pushed aside because something else looked more pressing.
This always used to be one of the more frustrating aspects of corporate life to me. You can spend a whole day answering urgent requests and finish feeling incredibly busy, having made very little progress on what you set out to do. Meanwhile, there’s a hidden cost to all that stopping and starting. When you’re constantly pulled away, it takes a surprising amount of time to get your concentration back. Even a ten-minute request can wreck a working day, and when it happens repeatedly, people end up working incredibly hard without producing their best work.
Three ways to push back without being difficult
How do you protect your time without creating unnecessary conflict? Here’s what I’d suggest.
Ask a few more questions about the deadline, to understand what’s driving it. “Why is this so urgent?” can sound confrontational, so try “Is there a particular meeting or decision this needs to be ready for?” Or, even more simply, “What happens if we deliver this tomorrow instead?” Sometimes there’s a perfectly good reason. Other times you’ll discover the deadline is a preference rather than a necessity, which opens the door to a conversation about what’s realistic.
Make the trade-offs visible. The person making an urgent request often can’t see what you’re putting aside to accommodate it. If your manager asks you to drop everything and prepare a briefing by the end of the day, you could say, “I can do that, but it means the proposal I’m working on will have to wait until tomorrow. Is that what you’d like me to prioritise?” That’s a far more constructive conversation than saying you’re too busy. It also gives your manager the chance to make an informed decision about priorities.
Be explicit about what “urgent” means. If you’re a manager sending something outside working hours, make it clear whether you expect a response. If it can wait until tomorrow, say so. Or if you’re regularly receiving requests that seem urgent, it’s reasonable to ask what turnaround is actually expected. If nobody asks, everyone is working from assumptions, and those assumptions create an enormous amount of unnecessary pressure.
What individuals can’t fix
When it comes to manufactured urgency, I do want to acknowledge that there’s only so much you can do as an individual employee. If you work for a company where every instruction comes down from above marked urgent, questioning deadlines is going to be difficult. No amount of personal time management will fix a workplace where managers routinely create emergencies through poor planning.
Leaders also have a responsibility to think about the pressure they’re creating, particularly when they change people’s priorities at short notice. That includes recognising that their own sense of urgency isn’t necessarily shared by everyone else, or justified by the work itself.
Deadlines aren’t the enemy
Deadlines themselves are useful. Many of us need them to beat procrastination and get things finished, and anyone who has worked in publishing will tell you a deadline is a very effective way of focusing everyone’s attention.
The issue is whether the deadline is reasonable and what happens if you miss it. It’s also ask worth asking how the work was managed, and whether the urgency has been created by someone else’s poor planning. The deadline may now be urgent, but perhaps the situation didn’t have to become an emergency. When we accept these deadlines without question, we’re letting other people’s timelines set our priorities without knowing whether those timelines are reasonable.
So if something lands in your inbox marked urgent this week, see if you can spare a moment before you rearrange your entire day. Ask yourself what actually makes it urgent. What happens if it isn’t done immediately? What more important work might have to wait?
You might find the deadline does matter. Or you might find it’s completely made up, and you’ll get to hand back a little of the stress that someone else was trying to push onto you, for no good reason.
One thing I’m thinking about this week
Right now I’m moving house. Again.
I’ve moved between states five times in the past 15 or so years, so you’d think I’d be pretty good at it by now. While this latest move is only local, I’m currently being reminded just how painful the whole process can be.
Also, can someone explain how it’s possible to accumulate so much junk in just two years? I swear half the stuff I’m packing wasn’t here when I moved in.
Anyway, that’s pretty much all I’ve got the mental capacity to think about this week. Between packing boxes and working out the logistics, there’s not a lot of room left for anything else.
I’ll be back to thinking about the future of work once I can find my way out from under the packing tape.
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