The ‘Everything Is Urgent’ Culure Is Burning Everyone Out — Here’s How to Reset Priorities Before It’s Too Late

During a recent stay at a hotel, the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night. Bleary-eyed, I threw on my shoes, grabbed my phone and stumbled toward the lobby to join the rest of the hotel’s guests, who had all just performed the same half-asleep, fully panicked dance I had.

Calm was restored after about 20 minutes (it was a false alarm), but even after I’d returned to the quiet of my room, my heart kept pounding. It felt like forever before I was finally able to relax enough to fall back asleep, and the next day, I was tired and cranky as a result of the interruption.

These things happen. But the alarm incident reminded me that emergencies — real or not — take an incredible toll on our nervous systems. It also struck me how similar this felt to a workplace where everything is treated like a fire drill. Urgency has its place. But when every request becomes an all-caps, panic button moment, nothing truly urgent stands out — and your teams pay the price.

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The urgency trap

These days, “urgent” has become a default setting. Routine requests have somehow become “time-sensitive.” Slack messages are marked “high-priority” without any evidence that they actually are. Leaders aren’t creating chaos intentionally, but this constant state of crisis is becoming commonplace.

False urgency has always existed, but it’s been heightened in recent years by the twinned forces of increased connectivity and the “always on” culture that gained steam during the pandemic, dramatically shrinking the work/office divide. Emails and DMs whiz around at all hours, leaving employees confused about what they should answer now, and what can wait until the next day. “No leader intentionally fabricates false urgency, but it can surreptitiously embed itself and become a team norm,” says executive coach Dina Denham Smith in Harvard Business Review.

Panic may be the new normal, but it’s also wreaking havoc on employee wellbeing. Existing in a chronic state of heightened stress can have powerful physiological effects, contributing to high blood pressure and even brain changes that can lead to anxiety, depression and addiction. Weight gain, headaches and problems with memory and focus are widely cited as risks for the perpetually over-stressed, in addition to serious conditions like stroke or heart disease.

Of course, some things are genuinely urgent. System outage? Data breach? By all means, sound the alarm. Every business has the potential for emergencies, especially if there’s a risk of losing customers or damaging their trust. But just because something feels like it should be done STAT, doesn’t mean it actually has to be.

Urgent vs. important (or neither)

Employees are wisening up to the urgency trap, and they’re less and less likely to jump at every flagged memo — especially Gen Z. For previous generations, there was an expectation that going above and beyond would yield tangible career advancement, or at least that their loyalty would be reciprocated.

As that reality has eroded, Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach, tells the Washington Post that those under 40 are no longer willing to burn themselves out for jobs that don’t respect their time and mental well-being — a sort of corrective for the one-sided nature of today’s workplace expectations. “The way that it’s showing up at work is pushing back on a lot of the expectations that are not mutually beneficial,” she said.

Rather than lose valuable workers, leaders need to get better at parsing the difference between what’s urgent, what is merely important and what is neither.

One way I’ve observed that leaders fall into the urgency trap is that they are simply failing to think critically about the implications of considering everything an emergency. When you’re running a business, faster is always better, right? This is especially true of founders-turned-leaders, who sometimes struggle to remember that not everyone on their team eats, sleeps and breathes the business the way they do. A mentee of mine once told me that her manager casually suggested she cancel a long-awaited weekend trip on the off chance a project “blew up” while she was gone. There was no deadline or client waiting for something to get done — in fact, there was no real risk at all. It was just his reflexive belief that something might require her attention, and therefore she should remain on standby. That’s a terrible approach to leadership.

I’ve long been a fan of the Eisenhower Matrix to ensure I am prioritizing critical work. Categorizing tasks into one of the four quadrants — urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but unimportant, and neither important nor urgent — requires ruthlessly categorizing what actually matters. Taking time to prioritize means not only side-stepping the urgency trap, it also keeps you from chasing short, non-essential deadlines that may deliver a quick dopamine hit, but ultimately aren’t helping you advance your core goals.

A couple of quips now common among Gen Z: We’re saving PDFs, not lives. It’s PR (or HR), not the ER. For leaders accustomed to constantly putting out fires, it’s easy to lose perspective on what really matters. But no one — not you or your team — can live in a constant state of panic without suffering the consequences.

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