Most workplace urgency is, in reality, the discomfort of waiting.
Some operations are genuinely time-sensitive: high-frequency trading, ambulance dispatch, responding to a critical system failure, or monetizing hype. There, the cost of delay grows rapidly.
But how much workplace urgency really belongs to this category?
Usually, nothing material changes whether you reply in 10 minutes or 10 hours. Unless your answer is on the project’s critical path, urgency mostly serves someone’s need to feel relieved.
This doesn’t mean every action can take ten hours. But project pace is another topic. Fast communication is not the same as fast execution.
Our brains like urgency
A paper published in 2018 described the Mere Urgency Effect: people are more likely to perform “unimportant tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively lower payoffs) over important tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively better payoffs), when the unimportant tasks are characterized merely by spurious urgency (e.g., an illusion of expiration).”
Urgency is sugar for the brain.
This makes imposed urgency especially dangerous. “Have you seen my message?” in the chat. “When? Haven’t you looked yet?” at the next meeting. It feels too minor to refuse, and there is a very willing part of the receiver ready to accept it.
So an unimportant task with a deadline defeats a much more valuable piece of work inside someone’s flow, without anyone consciously deciding it should.
We hate uncertainty
Sometimes we ask people to work faster when what we really want is to feel certain sooner.
A fast response, an “online” status, or presence in the office reads as “working,” so it reassures us. But this reassurance has a real cost. The energy spent demonstrating work is taken from the work itself.
In some cultures, silence means you need to chase. When I moved to Japan, I learned that silence may mean someone is simply doing the job.
Before you chase
Next time you’re about to write “have you read my message?”, ask whether there is a real cost to waiting or you just want to feel certain sooner.
One deserves speed. The other asks someone to pay for your relief with their focus.