The Cult of Urgency
How everything became an emergency, and why that’s making us slower.
Somewhere, right now, someone is marking an email as High Importance because they need an answer before lunch.
Not because the business is on fire.
Not because lives are at risk.
Because they’d quite like to tick something off before they go home.
Welcome to the Cult of Urgency.
Membership is free.
The only requirement is that everything must be treated as though civilisation depends on it.
Every workplace has its rituals.
The red exclamation mark.
The “Just checking you’ve seen this…”
The Teams message that arrives thirty-seven seconds after the email.
The phone call to ask if you’ve seen the Teams message about the email.
Then, just to complete the set, someone walks over to your desk to ask if you’ve had a chance to look at the email about the Teams message they sent regarding the original email.
By this point, you’ve spent more time talking about the work than it would have taken to actually do it.
Urgency has become contagious.
One person panics.
Then another.
Before long, six people are in a meeting discussing a problem that, only yesterday, would have comfortably waited until Friday.
It’s remarkable how often “urgent” simply means:
“I’ve known about this for three weeks.”
We’ve all met the Professional Reminder.
08:31 – Original email.
08:46 – “Just checking you’ve seen this.”
08:53 – Teams message.
09:02 – Phone call.
09:07 – Appears beside your desk.
The fascinating part?
At no point did they consider that you might have been… working.
Here’s a fun experiment.
The next time someone tells you something is urgent, ask a simple question.
“When does this become a problem?”
Not “When would you like it?”
Not “How quickly can I do it?”
“When does it actually become a problem?”
It’s amazing how many “urgent” requests suddenly discover they have until next Tuesday.
Real urgency exists.
Hospitals deal with urgency.
Emergency services deal with urgency.
Air traffic controllers deal with urgency.
Most offices?
We’re trying to locate version Final_v7_UseThisOne_ACTUALFINAL(2).xlsx before the meeting starts.
Perspective is a wonderful thing.
The irony is that organisations obsessed with urgency often become slower.
When everything jumps to the front of the queue…
There is no queue.
People stop planning because planning assumes priorities stay stable for longer than eight minutes.
Deep work disappears.
Attention fragments.
Everyone becomes busy.
Very little becomes finished.
There’s another cost.
When every request is labelled urgent, the genuinely important ones lose their signal.
It’s the organisational equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.
After the fifteenth “ASAP”, people quietly stop believing you.
My personal favourite is the meeting that ends with:
“We really need to move quickly on this.”
Followed immediately by:
“Let’s arrange another meeting next week.”
Remarkable.
The most impressive people I’ve worked with have rarely been the ones shouting the loudest.
They weren’t sprinting through corridors clutching laptops like they were carrying the nuclear launch codes.
They weren’t proudly announcing they’d worked until midnight.
They weren’t sending emails at 23:47 that absolutely could have waited until morning.
They were calm.
Deliberate.
They understood something that the Cult of Urgency often forgets.
Speed and panic are not the same thing.
In fact, they’re usually opposites.
Perhaps we’ve mistaken motion for progress.
An overflowing calendar looks productive.
A constantly flashing Teams icon feels productive.
An inbox with 147 unread emails certainly feels important.
A meeting called “Quick Catch Up” with fourteen attendees somehow feels… inevitable.
But none of those things tell us whether meaningful work is actually happening.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do isn’t responding faster.
It’s protecting enough uninterrupted time to solve the problem properly.
The next time you’re tempted to write “URGENT” in the subject line, pause for a moment.
Ask yourself one question.
Is this genuinely urgent…
…or am I simply hoping somebody else will adopt my poor planning as their emergency?
Because those are very different things.
And one of them has quietly become a religion.