When Everything Is Urgent at Work

There is a difference between rising to the occasion and working in a culture where every occasion is treated like an emergency.

I've never had a problem working hard. Over the course of my career, I've put in plenty of long days, late nights, and occasional weekends. I’ve jumped on emergency calls while on vacation out of the country. When you work in digital operations, as I do, things break. Websites go down, launches encounter problems, and business-critical issues don't always have the courtesy to occur between nine and five in your specific time zone.

When something genuinely important needs attention, I'm the person who wants to get it fixed. I've always taken pride in being dependable, particularly when the stakes are high, and other people are counting on me.

But there is a difference between occasionally responding to an emergency and working somewhere that treats everything like one.

I learned that distinction at a company where urgency wasn't an occasional disruption to normal business. It gradually became normal business full stop. Projects, approvals, revisions, launches, and routine requests all seemed to arrive with the same implied deadline: immediately.

At first, I thought we were navigating a particularly demanding period. Or perhaps that I was adjusting to a new working environment that would normalize. Eventually, I realized the demanding period wasn't going to end.

It was the operating model.

A Modicum of Effort

One of the moments that crystallized the problem came when I was asked to work over a weekend to complete an entirely ordinary task. It wasn't a website outage, an issue affecting customers, or anything that would cause measurable harm if it waited until Monday. The request came in at the end of a Friday, and I had innocently responded, “Of course, I’ll take care of it first thing Monday morning.”

I was asked to make a "modicum of effort" to get it done over the weekend.

That phrase has stayed with me.

On its face, it sounds almost harmless. A little extra effort. A small favor. Nothing terribly unreasonable. But it carried a tone that was undeniably shitty. It also carried an assumption I wasn't willing to accept: that my personal time should remain available whenever someone else decided their request was important.

I was irritated enough that I worked until ten o'clock that Friday night to finish the task. Not because it suddenly became urgent, but because I wasn't about to surrender a single second of my Saturday or Sunday to something that could have been completed the following week without consequence.

I’ve always been a person who’s strived to set distinct work-life boundaries. However, in this particular role, I already knew that some members of management worked regularly on weekends. The non-stop emails made that obvious. After one three-day holiday weekend, I came back to over ninety messages. Eventually, I created rules that silenced Outlook notifications between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. on weekdays, and throughout the entire weekend.

I understood why some of those messages arrived when they did. Leadership often spent the entirety of their working hours in meetings and had to catch up afterward. But their schedules weren't mine, and I didn't believe their inability to finish work during normal working hours should automatically dictate how I spent my evenings.

I wasn't refusing to be available for a real emergency.

I was refusing to pretend that ordinary work becomes an emergency simply because someone else wasn’t able to make the request until 8 at night.

When Saturday Becomes a Workday

Another weekend brought an even better example of what happens when urgency replaces judgment.

The CEO had visited the company's website, called the displayed contact phone number, and discovered that the automated prompts were outdated. That was a legitimate issue worth correcting. The number, however, had been published unchanged since before I joined the company, and there was no immediate reason the website needed to change that Saturday. The problem had existed for months, if not years. The company’s offerings were strictly B2B, and the issue would have a minimal effect on customers over a weekend.

Nevertheless, the request came down to immediately replace the phone number across the company's multiple websites.

There was an additional complication. Part of the website codebase was outside my access, which meant bringing another developer into the effort. Instead of one person handling a routine correction during the workweek, multiple people were now spending their weekend coordinating and implementing changes.

We completed the request.

Early Monday morning, we learned that the automated prompts associated with the original number had been updated. The solution was to restore the original number to the websites.

Everything we'd done over the weekend had to be reversed.

The underlying problem had been real. The manufactured urgency around its solution wasn’t.

That's an important distinction. There was nothing inherently wrong with identifying an outdated customer experience and wanting to improve it. The failure was treating an issue that had existed for some time as though it required an immediate, disruptive response before anyone had fully considered the available options or whether this would have any meaningful impact over a weekend.

A little patience, common sense, and coordination would have produced the correct outcome without consuming anyone's weekend.

Instead, we'd created work, completed it, and then created more work undoing it.

Four Websites and a Constant State of Emergency

The problem became much more consequential during a period when we launched four enterprise websites in a single year.

Anyone who has managed a complex website launch knows how much coordination is involved. Content development, technical implementation, quality assurance, stakeholder reviews, approvals, accessibility, analytics, and countless small dependencies all need attention before a site goes live.

Those activities are difficult enough with adequate time and resources. Compress the schedule, restrict staffing, and introduce continuous leadership revisions, and an already demanding process can become punishing.

We were working with an external agency responsible for building the sites. But as launch dates approached, large volumes of change requests, corrections, and last-minute revisions landed solely with me.

The reason was largely practical: I was immediately reachable and could implement changes quickly, day or night, whereas the agency was not. And I could complete the work before the next leadership review, which happened during daily 9 am meetings.

That accessibility gradually turned me into the default path for getting things done. All the things.

Development environments would become available, and we'd have only a handful of days to populate content and conduct quality assurance. Staff and leadership reviews generated more changes, which generated more work, which consumed the time we needed to review everything properly.

During the most demanding stretches, I was working days that stretched beyond sixteen hours, including weekends.

I wasn't simply doing my normal job for additional hours. I was operating in a continuous cycle of reacting to whatever had most recently become urgent. There was little opportunity to step away, assess the larger picture, or ask whether the latest request was the best use of our limited time.

And because we were moving so quickly, issues that should have been identified before launch sometimes became problems to correct afterward.

That's one of the cruelties of operating this way. The organization creates an impossible schedule, people exhaust themselves meeting it, and the resulting mistakes become another round of urgent work.

The fire drills start producing their own fuel.

The Day Someone Asked If I Was Okay

When I think about that period, one of the memories that stands out has nothing to do with a website.

I was in the office kitchenette, filling my water bottle after an especially brutal launch. A member of the creative team walked in. We'd worked together throughout a difficult weekend, and I'd repeatedly contacted him for images and revisions requested by management.

I felt terrible about how much I'd asked of him. Every new change meant another interruption, another request, another thing he needed to finish when he should have been doing something else. He and his wife were expecting their first child at the time.

He walked over, put his hand on my shoulder, looked me directly in the eyes, and asked, "Are you okay?"

I hadn't expected that; I was stunned by it.

I'd been so focused on how much additional work I was creating for him that I hadn't considered what the experience looked like from his perspective. While I was worried about the demands I was placing on my coworkers, he was worried about what the avalanche of demands was doing to me.

It was a small gesture, but it said a great deal about the atmosphere we'd been working in.

Behind the deadlines and review meetings were people who were exhausted, frustrated, and increasingly uncertain about how long they could maintain the pace. There were whispered conversations with coworkers about the workload, the shifting priorities, and the feeling that no matter how much we accomplished, another emergency was waiting.

Those conversations weren't evidence that people didn't care about their jobs.

Quite the opposite. Many of us cared enormously about the quality of our work. The frustration came from wanting to do that work well while operating in an environment that made doing so unnecessarily difficult.

The First Thing I Lost Wasn't My Creativity

It's tempting to describe constant workplace urgency as something that destroys creativity or motivation. That wasn't exactly my experience.

I still loved the work itself. I enjoyed solving complicated problems, finding efficient approaches, and figuring out how to make difficult systems behave. Even during the worst periods, that part of my professional identity remained intact.

What changed was my willingness to push back.

Early on, when an unreasonable request arrived, I could recognize it immediately. I would question the timeline, consider the alternatives, or explain why something couldn't reasonably be accomplished under the circumstances.

Over time, the grind eroded my ability to do that.

I'd receive another request, have a brief flash of disbelief and anger at what was being asked, and then resign myself to it and simply get to work. I'd stay online several more hours, finish whatever needed finishing, and send a message saying it was done.

The objection never made it out of my head.

That might sound like professional resilience. From the outside, it probably looked like someone who could be counted on to deliver under pressure.

But there's a significant difference between becoming more capable and becoming too exhausted to object.

I hadn't suddenly decided every request was reasonable. I'd simply learned that there is a tipping point where challenging the requests would take energy I no longer had.

And that's where a workplace culture built around constant urgency becomes genuinely damaging. People can continue producing results long after they've lost the ability to make sense out of the process.

Their output can conceal their exhaustion, frustration, and depleted capacity to stand up for themselves.

The First Thing I Lost Wasn't My Creativity

It's tempting to describe constant workplace urgency as something that destroys creativity or motivation. That wasn't exactly my experience.

I still loved the work itself. I enjoyed solving complicated problems, finding efficient approaches, and figuring out how to make difficult systems behave. Even during the worst periods, that part of my professional identity remained intact.

What changed was my willingness to push back.

Early on, when an unreasonable request arrived, I could recognize it immediately. I would question the timeline, consider the alternatives, or explain why something couldn't reasonably be accomplished under the circumstances.

Over time, the grind eroded my ability to do that.

I'd receive another request, have a brief flash of disbelief and anger at what was being asked, and then resign myself to it and simply get to work. I'd stay online several more hours, finish whatever needed finishing, and send a message saying it was done.

The objection never made it out of my head.

That might sound like professional resilience. From the outside, it probably looked like someone who could be counted on to deliver under pressure.

But there's a significant difference between becoming more capable and becoming too exhausted to object.

I hadn't suddenly decided every request was reasonable. I'd simply learned that there is a tipping point where challenging the requests would take energy I no longer had.

And that's where a workplace culture built around constant urgency becomes genuinely damaging. People can continue producing results long after they've lost the ability to make sense out of the process.

Their output can conceal their exhaustion, frustration, and depleted capacity to stand up for themselves.

Strategy Needs Room to Breathe

One of the contradictions I encountered was that the organization genuinely wanted strategic thinking.

There were discussions about improving processes, developing longer-term plans, and making smarter decisions. Those weren't necessarily empty ambitions. The company would hold comprehensive planning sessions that would last weeks to develop strategies and goals.

The problem was that we were expected to execute those strategies and goals while simultaneously handling an endless stream of immediate demands.

With limited staffing and non-existent operational redundancy, there was rarely enough room for both.

Strategic work requires time to examine patterns, evaluate alternatives, challenge assumptions, and consider consequences. It often involves deliberately deciding what not to do.

Reactive work rewards almost the opposite behavior. Respond quickly. Make the change. Satisfy the latest request. Move on to whatever comes next.

Neither approach is inherently wrong. An effective organization needs both. But when urgent execution consumes nearly every available hour of every day, strategy becomes something people discuss between emergencies rather than something they have the capacity to implement.

And when thoughtful planning is repeatedly displaced by last-minute decisions, the consequences accumulate.

Quality suffers. Employees become frustrated. Confidence in leadership weakens. Talented people begin questioning whether they want to stay. The organization may still be moving quickly, but speed alone doesn't mean it's moving in the right direction.

Sometimes the most productive decision a leader can make is to ask whether something truly needs to happen today.

That question shouldn't be revolutionary.

If Everything Is Bold, Nothing Is Bold

Years before my experiences in this role, while I was working as a freelance web developer, I had a client who requested that I update every line of text on his website to be bold.

He was an attorney, and his reasoning was straightforward. He wanted visitors to understand how important the information was, so he wanted all of it emphasized.

I had to explain why that wouldn't work.

Bold text is useful because it stands apart from the surrounding text. It creates contrast, establishes emphasis, and directs attention toward information that deserves special consideration.

But if every word is bold, the distinction disappears. Nothing stands out because everything is competing for the same attention.

And once everything is bold, there's no way to make anything more bold when something genuinely important comes along.
It took some convincing, but he eventually understood.

I've thought about that conversation many times when reflecting on workplace urgency.

Urgency works the same way.

A genuine emergency deserves an immediate response because it is exceptional. It interrupts normal priorities for a good reason. People understand why the usual rules have changed, and they're often willing to make extraordinary efforts to resolve it.

But when every request receives the same level of urgency, the distinction disappears.

A routine website correction gets treated like a critical outage. An ordinary approval becomes a weekend assignment. A preference expressed during a leadership review turns into another late-night deadline.

Eventually, employees have no reliable way to distinguish what truly matters from what someone simply wants done immediately.

And when an actual emergency arrives, the organization is already operating at full intensity. There's no additional capacity to draw upon, no reserve of attention, and no meaningful opportunity to raise the stakes.

Everything is already bold.

Hard Work Shouldn't Require Permanent Emergency Mode

I don't believe demanding work is inherently unhealthy. Some of the most rewarding experiences of my career have involved difficult challenges, ambitious goals, and periods when everyone needed to band together as a team and contribute more than usual.

I also don't believe every after-hours request represents bad management. I can list dozens of legitimate reasons to ask people to step outside their normal schedules, especially in roles responsible for business-critical systems.

What matters is judgment, frequency, and whether the organization recognizes the difference between necessary effort and unnecessary disruption.

A genuine emergency should be rare enough that people understand why it's an emergency. Additional effort should have a clear purpose. Leadership should acknowledge and give recognition for the extra effort and not treat it as if it comes with the territory. And when teams repeatedly find themselves working nights and weekends, leadership should be asking what needs to change rather than treating that sacrifice as proof that the system works.

People can rise to extraordinary occasions. They shouldn't have to live in one.

Looking back, the most troubling part of my experience wasn't any single unreasonable deadline. It was how ordinary those deadlines became, and how eventually I stopped questioning them.

I had spent years building a career around solving problems, taking ownership, and being someone others could rely on. Those are qualities I still value. But reliability shouldn't mean surrendering every boundary, and dedication shouldn't require accepting manufactured urgency as an unavoidable condition of employment.

There's a difference between working hard and working in a system that makes everything harder than it needs to be.

And if everything is urgent, eventually nothing is.

Not because the work doesn't matter, but because the organization has lost the ability to distinguish what matters most.

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