Your Urgency Is Not Their Emergency
How to recalibrate so your team knows when to actually sprint
I COST MY BEST DESIGNER HIS ANNIVERSARY DINNER FOR CHANGES THAT WERE NOT EVEN NEEDED.
It was 9:47 PM on a Thursday when I sent the Slack message.
“URGENT: Need the deck revised before tomorrow’s meeting. Client asked for changes.”
My designer, Marcus, responded at 10:15 PM. He’d been having dinner with his wife. He worked until 1 AM making revisions.
The next morning, I walked into the meeting and realized: the client hadn’t actually asked for changes. They’d mentioned something they were “curious about.” I’d interpreted their curiosity as a demand. FML. I’d panic-translated a question into an emergency.
Marcus had missed his wedding anniversary dinner—the rescheduled one, because he’d also missed the actual anniversary—for changes that weren’t even needed.
This wasn’t the first time. We’d spent three years training my team that everything was urgent. Every Slack message needed an immediate response. Every email was ASAP. Every deadline was critical.
And because everything was urgent, nothing was.
My team had adapted in predictable ways. Some burned out trying to treat everything as critical. Others developed what I now call “urgency deafness”—a survival mechanism where they simply stopped reacting to our organization’s panic. They’d learned that our “urgent” meant “someone is anxious,” not “the business is on fire.”
We were the boy who cried wolf. And we had trained our entire team to stop believing us.
The wake-up call wasn’t Marcus’s missed dinner—though it should have been. It was three months later, when we had an actual emergency. A client site went down during their biggest sales event of the year. I marked it urgent. I called people. I escalated.
And for the first twenty minutes, nobody moved quickly. Because nobody believed me. I’d spent years eroding my own credibility.
YOUR ANXIETY ISN’T A PRIORITY TIER.
HERE’S WHY YOUR TEAM CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE.
Urgency is a signal. And like any signal, it loses meaning through overuse.
Think about car alarms. When you hear one, do you rush to see if someone’s car is being stolen? Of course not. Car alarms go off constantly for no reason. The signal has been degraded to the point of meaninglessness.
This is exactly what happens when leaders mark everything urgent.
The Psychology of Signal Degradation:
Your brain is constantly filtering information, deciding what deserves attention and what can be ignored. This filtering is based on patterns. If something is consistently not actually urgent despite being labeled urgent, your brain learns to filter it out.
This isn’t laziness. It’s efficiency. Your team’s brains are doing exactly what brains are supposed to do: conserving energy by ignoring false alarms.
The Two Failure Modes:
When urgency is overused, teams adapt in one of two ways:
Mode 1: Chronic Burnout. Some people try to treat everything as critical. They work nights and weekends responding to every “urgent” request. They never rest. They’re constantly in fight-or-flight mode.
This isn’t sustainable. Eventually, they crash, and when they do, it’s usually sudden and complete. Burnout doesn’t give much warning.
Mode 2: Urgency Deafness. Other people (often the more experienced ones) learn to calibrate. They recognize that your “urgent” doesn’t mean actually urgent. They develop their own internal filters.
This is adaptive for them, but catastrophic for you. When a real emergency happens, they won’t move fast—because they’ve learned that your emergencies usually aren’t.
The Anxiety-Urgency Conflation:
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most “urgent” requests are actually anxiety dressed up as priority.
Something feels uncomfortable. You’re worried about how it will look if it’s not done. You have a story in your head about consequences that may or may not be real. So you mark it urgent—not because the business requires it, but because your nervous system does.
Your team can’t distinguish between “this is actually time-critical” and “Anna is anxious about this.” That’s your job. And if you don’t do it, you’re essentially making your emotional state their problem.
THE 6-STEP PROTOCOL TO MAKE ‘URGENT’ MEAN SOMETHING ELSE.
The Recalibration Protocol:
Step 1: Create explicit priority tiers.
Define what each level actually means. Be specific. Write it down. Share it with your team.
P1 (TRUE URGENT): Business is on fire. Revenue is actively being lost. The client relationship is in immediate jeopardy. Drop everything.
P2 (IMPORTANT): Matters significantly. Needs to happen this week. But not at the cost of sleep or sanity.
P3 (SHOULD HAPPEN): Would be good to do. Flexible on timing. No real consequence to reasonable delay.
Most things are P3. Some things are P2. Almost nothing is P1.
Step 2: Audit your last month.
Go through your Slack messages and emails from the past 30 days. Count how many times you used “urgent,” “ASAP,” “critical,” or “emergency.”
Now, honestly assess: how many of those were actually P1? If less than 10%, you’ve been degrading the signal.
Step 3: Reserve “urgent” for genuine urgency.
A good rule: if you use “urgent” more than once a month, it’s too much. When you do use it, your team should feel the weight of it because they haven’t been numbed by overuse.
Step 4: Include context and consequences.
Instead of “URGENT: Need this ASAP,” try: “P1: The client site is down and they’re losing approximately $10K per hour. We need a fix deployed within 2 hours.”
Give your team the information to calibrate their own response. Treat them like adults. The specificity also forces you to articulate why something is actually urgent—which often reveals that it isn’t.
Step 5: Audit your own anxiety.
Before marking something urgent, pause and ask:
Is this actually time-critical, or am I just anxious about it?
What specifically happens if this waits 24 hours?
Would I expect my team to work overtime for this? If not, it’s not P1.
Your emotional state doesn’t determine priority. A calm assessment might reveal that most “urgent” things are simply uncomfortable—not time-critical.
Step 6: Model sustainable pace.
If you’re always in crisis mode, your team will mirror that. The energy you bring sets the baseline. You can’t ask for calm execution while radiating panic.
Send non-urgent messages with scheduled send. Don’t respond to Slack on weekends unless it’s actually P1. Show your team what sustainable looks like.
Your team will sprint for you—but only if they trust that when you say “sprint,” you mean it. Protect the signal. Use it wisely.