Email after email. Running from meeting to meeting, while running on fumes. Frazzled. Every task demands immediate attention and there’s no time to breathe.
Welcome to the urgency culture.
“It does drive me over the edge,” says Nina Pullman, a British Dubai-based sales professional, who in her own words, was in such a “frenzy” at work last week that she had no time for proper, healthy meals. “I think for two nights straight, I was just bingeing on ice-cream while hammering away at the laptop as I didn’t have time to cook anything for myself,” she says. Another corporate professional, Diya Menon, based in Abu Dhabi, can’t remember the last time that she didn’t feel as if she was on a “hamster wheel”. “I’m used to the stress. I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” she admits.
The exhaustion of urgency
These sentiments summarise the ethos that prioritise the grind and chase over everything else, explains John Pullman, an American Dubai-based workplace wellness coach and consultant. “This frantic rush to accomplish tasks and achieve our dreams, just blurs the distinction between what’s actually urgent and truly important. That’s the exhaustion of urgency culture: Where we just live in a state of chaos and panic,” he says. “It’s that state of living in constant overwhelm, and wondering ‘what do I have to do next’?”
As Tracey Reid, a British Dubai-based corporate wellness coach explains, urgency culture thrives on the misplaced focus on the “grind”, which is a relentless pursuit of productivity at the cost of your well-being. “This feeling of constant pressure and overwhelm, clouds your creativity and ultimately leads to a burnout,” she says. There is a persistent anxiety to be always “on top of things”, which leads to a state of heightened alertness. “You become permanently hyper-vigilant,” she adds.
It's important to remember that urgency itself, isn't a bad thing. The problem arises, when you believe everything is urgent and find yourself in a state of fatigue and exhaustion. "In the long run, unnecessary urgency drains energy from the work that really matters. The answer is to pivot from urgency to prioritisation," says Lucy d''Abo, the CEO of Together, a workplace consultancy.
There are many drivers behind this urgency culture, and one of them being, a deep respect of hierarchy, she says. "Anything said by a senior leader can be reinterpreted as an instruction that needs to be immediately addressed. This results in current activities being dropped and de-prioritised, often unecessarily," she adds.
Urgency, generally isn't a bad thing. However, in the long run, unnecessary urgency drains energy from the work that really matters. The answer is to pivot from urgency to prioritisation....
The urgency culture matches our current need for instant gratification, says Denis Liam Murphy, a Dubai-based life coach and author. “Our attention spans are dwindling, to a point that we can only scroll for a few seconds. This is now merging into how we communicate in and outside of work,” he says, adding that we now anticipate calamity, if we don’t reply soon.
The numbers speak for themselves. According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2023 report, nearly a quarter of adults in the US report feeling high levels of stress post-pandemic, marking a 19 per cent increase since 2019. Younger adults are even more exhausted, with almost half of Gen Z and more than a third of millennials reporting feeling anxious or stressed all or most of the time. As Reid explains, the anxiety fuels the sense of urgency, and so the person gets entrapped in a rather vicious cycle.
The false alarms
Reid explains the urgency trap with a few examples: Imagine your team is working diligently on a project with a clear deadline. Suddenly, the manager throws in a major requirement change, demanding it be integrated "as soon as possible." This disrupts the workflow and adds unnecessary stress, especially if the change could have been discussed earlier.
There are so many manifestations of these kind of “urgencies” in the workplace, as she says. “For example, setting unrealistic deadlines with tight turnarounds, without considering the workload. That creates unnecessary pressure and leads to low-quality work. Another instance is the bane of micro-managing. The constant influx of emails, the demand for meetings creates that feeling that you must respond to everything immediately, even when communication isn’t urgent. The idea? You must be present, because if you aren’t, something will collapse. It disrupts the focus and the flow, and it becomes difficult to complete tasks properly,” adds Reid. “Dropping critical tasks on an already overworked employee at the eleventh hour without any warning, is also a sign of false urgency,” she says.
And as much as people like to believe, multi-tasking isn’t a healthy option. “It slows the brain down and reduces productivity,” says Reid.
It’s also the demand for immediate solutions to complex problems that generates further panic in the guise of urgency, as Sydney Lois, a stress specialist elaborates. “You cannot demand immediate solutions for complex problems: It just nudges your employees further into a state of anxiety. If there’s a difficult problem at hand, it requires analytical thinking and time - it is not possible to expect a quick fix; in fact, it is unreasonable.”
Owing to these false urgencies, a person becomes overstimulated, affects the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a role in happiness and learning. And so, you are unable to feel joy in much else. “Moreover, you start engaging in rather shallow thinking. The brain is now overwhelmed by the overload of information and begins to make hasty decisions. So, your ability to engage in actual deep work is ruptured; your concentration becomes fractured,” she says. Moreover, this urgency culture hampers your physical health too.
“Your body starts feeling like it’s in a fight-or-flight response, so your breathing becomes faster. There is an increase in blood pressure and you find it more difficult to regulate emotions,” she adds. This overactive fight-or-flight response results in hypertension, sleep deprivation, inflammation, high cholesterol and inflammatory diseases.
How do you combat the urgency culture?
Well, for starters, take a step back and breathe, as Murphy suggests. Evaluate whether a certain “urgent” task really demands your attention. Does it align with your priorities?
Take a step back and breathe. Evaluate whether a certain “urgent” task really demands your attention. Does it align with your priorities?
As Lois explains, in order to combat urgency culture, there needs to be clear expectations of boundaries, so that you can plan and prioritise better. You also need to engage in activities that you find healing, so that you can remind yourself there is no rush. This helps you to approach complex problems more meaningfully, rather than engage with difficulties in a panic. Prioritise doing one single task at a time. “That has higher chances of improved productivity,” says Reid. Try using time blocks: Finish one task at a time, before moving on to the next. When you achieve this, you feel a sense of joy, and accomplishment. The joy of completing each time block should give you a dose of dopamine, and makes you more motivated.
A few tips:
1. Prioritise ruthlessly: Not everything is equally urgent. Learn to differentiate between true deadlines and tasks that can wait.
2. Set boundaries: Don't be afraid to say no or set clear expectations for your availability.
3. Focus on deep work: Schedule time for focused work sessions free from distractions to truly accomplish important tasks.
4. Take care of yourself: Prioritise sleep, healthy eating, and exercise to maintain your physical and mental well-being.
Moreover, according to d'Abo, managers also have a strong responsibility. They should explain the 'clear why' to employees, if something is urgent. "This type of urgency, if combined with a clear ‘why’, can actually be motivating. If your employees are united by a vision to push the company forward and are given clear rationale for the urgency, the sense of unity on delivering on a tight timeline can actually be uniting," she says. As she says, the rewards are immense, but this tactic shouldn't be leveraged without cause. "A culture that normalises a false sense of urgency could eventually run your employees and business into the ground," she says.
