A few years ago, someone shared with me a document about supremacy in the workplace, and one of the symptoms that stood out to me was the tendency to manufacture urgency.
In American work culture, there’s a tendency to liberally label things as urgent. It’s as though our work systems don’t know how to function without the element of urgency. Once I became aware of this, I started to notice it everywhere.
So much of the stuff we consider urgent on a week after week basis is simply made up. When you start to ask the question, “is this really urgent?” you start to find out how over-used this label is.
For a while, I’ve practiced being really stingy about calling things urgent, and it’s worked out quite well.