Always-On Culture: How artificial urgency makes work suck

"This is urgent!" announces the email that arrives at 7:30 PM on a Friday. By Monday morning, three more "urgent" requests have piled up, each from a different stakeholder who believes their project deserves immediate attention. Meanwhile, your calendar has transformed into a game of Tetris where meetings stack endlessly, leaving you wondering when you're supposed to actually complete all these "urgent" tasks.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to the always-on culture, where everything is urgent, everyone is perpetually available, and somehow, nothing ever seems to get completely finished before the next crisis begins.

The Urgency Paradox

This isn't going to be news to anyone. It never feels good to feel cortisol burning through your veins from 9 to 5, if it even stops then. In management circles—I even remember it from my teaching certification program—"creating a sense of urgency" is seen as a goal. How else would you get engagement from your class or from your team?

Short of confronting the reasons that the work put in front of someone doesn't feel engaging, manufactured urgency just makes folks' lives hell.

"Urgency is the thief of joy," as I always say.

But of course, there is a case to be made for urgency—that, in fact, it can be an expression of empathy. That it is a reflection that you care, that you are intent on helping your peer, customer, etc.

And yet, manufactured urgency—where everything is urgent; where everything needs to be done ASAP; where time is money and breaks are an expense—is actually a net negative.

Here's the strange truth about workplace urgency: the more things are labeled "urgent," the less urgency actually means. When everything is a priority, nothing is.

Yet organizations continue manufacturing artificial urgency like it's going out of style. Why? Because urgency creates a powerful illusion of productivity, importance, and momentum. It triggers adrenaline, focuses attention, and temporarily boosts output. It's the workplace equivalent of a sugar rush – effective in the short term, but ultimately unsustainable and harmful.

A client of mine once described her company's approach perfectly: "We operate like every day is the last day of the quarter, even on January 2nd."

How Organizations Become Urgency Addicts

Artificial urgency doesn't just happen. It's cultivated through specific organizational habits that, once ingrained, become increasingly difficult to break:

1. The Responsiveness Arms Race

It starts innocently. Someone answers an email after hours. Their colleagues, not wanting to appear less dedicated, follow suit. Soon, instant responsiveness becomes the unspoken expectation.

A client who manages a marketing team shared how this escalated at her company: "First it was checking email on weekends. Then it was Slack in the evenings. Now people apologize if they don't respond to a message within an hour, regardless of when it's sent."

2. The Deadline Theater

"We absolutely need this by end of day!" declares the manager who won't actually review the document until next week.

Organizations perform deadline theater when they disconnect deadlines from actual business needs. Arbitrary timelines create artificial pressure that keeps everyone in a constant state of acceleration with no clear destination.

3. The Heroic Intervention Cycle

A problem emerges. Someone works through the night to solve it. They're publicly praised for their dedication. The lesson? Being reactive is rewarded more than being proactive.

This cycle subtly encourages teams to lurch from crisis to crisis rather than addressing root causes. It's the workplace equivalent of repeatedly calling the fire department instead of fixing the faulty wiring.

4. The Meeting Cascade

The calendar fills with meetings to discuss other meetings. People double-book themselves as a matter of course. Being "busy" becomes a proxy for being valuable.

The meeting cascade creates the appearance of urgent action while often delaying actual progress. As one exhausted executive told me, "I spend so much time talking about what needs to get done that I have no time left to do it."

5. The Always-Available Expectation

"I know you're on vacation, but could you just..."

When availability transcends reasonable boundaries, it signals that nothing – not evenings, weekends, or even vacations – is truly protected time. This expectation doesn't just affect time off; it creates a subtle undercurrent that you should always be working or thinking about work.

The Costs of Artificial Urgency

The damage from always-on cultures extends far beyond the obvious burnout and turnover:

Shallow thinking: Constant urgency favors quick reactions over thoughtful responses. Complex problems require deep focus that urgency cultures rarely permit.

Decision fatigue: The human brain can only make so many decisions before quality suffers. Always-on environments drain this limited resource on low-value choices.

Opportunity blindness: When you're perpetually reacting, you miss emerging opportunities that require looking beyond immediate demands.

Innovation drought: Creativity requires space – precisely what urgency eliminates. As one product designer told me, "Our best ideas come when we have room to breathe."

Relationship erosion: Sustained artificial urgency damages trust. Teams begin to question leadership's ability to plan, prioritize, and protect them from chaos.

Breaking the Urgency Addiction

If your organization is hooked on artificial urgency, recovery requires more than just time management tips. It demands a fundamental reset of expectations and systems:

Distinguish Between Urgency and Importance

Not everything urgent is important, and not everything important is urgent. Introduce language and frameworks (like the Eisenhower Matrix) that help teams make this distinction explicit.

A client who leads a software development team created a simple taxonomy: "On Fire" (truly urgent), "Heating Up" (becoming urgent), and "Simmering" (important but not time-sensitive). This vocabulary gave her team permission to prioritize thoughtfully rather than reactively.

Create Urgency Boundaries

Establish clear protocols for what constitutes a genuine emergency and how to handle it. When should someone be contacted after hours? What channels are appropriate? Who needs to be involved?

Without these boundaries, everything becomes a potential emergency, and employees never truly disconnect.

Reward Proactive Planning

Celebrate the team that prevented a crisis through foresight as enthusiastically as you would praise those who heroically solved one. Make "no surprises" a valued outcome.

Implement Response Expectations

Clarify realistic timeframes for responding to different types of communications. Perhaps emails require responses within 24 hours, but Slack messages need attention the same day. Whatever the expectations, make them explicit rather than letting the most anxious or responsive team members set the pace.

Create Recovery Rhythms

Build intentional downtime into your organizational calendar. Some companies implement "no meeting Fridays" or "focus afternoons." Others establish email blackout periods after hours.

One org I worked with instituted "hard stops" for their workday – they actually shut down their admin servers at 6 PM to physically prevent after-hours work. While extreme, it sent a powerful message about the company's commitment to sustainable pace.

A Personal Note on Urgency Cultures

I've been caught in the urgency trap myself. Early in my career, I believed being constantly available and responsive made me indispensable. I measured my value by how quickly I answered emails and how many consecutive hours I could work when "things got crazy."

What I eventually realized was that this approach wasn't making me more valuable – it was making me less effective. My best contributions never came from rushed reactions but from having the space to think deeply, consider alternatives, and focus on what truly mattered.

And in fact, once I had the space to think, I didn't know what to do with myself. This, perhaps more than anything else, is the worst effect of manufactured urgency—atrophying the capacity for slow work.

The irony of urgency addiction is that it often produces exactly what organizations are trying to avoid: missed deadlines, quality issues, and diminished results. By trying to do everything fast, we end up doing nothing particularly well.

If you're leading a team caught in the always-on cycle, the most valuable gift you can give them isn't another productivity hack or time management system. It's permission – permission to prioritize thoughtfully, to disconnect completely, and to value sustainability over heroics.

It might even be nice to have facilitated slow work sessions, to re-develop that skill, that muscle to think in a more intentional way about the problems you're facing.

After all, real productivity isn't about being constantly in motion. It's about moving deliberately in the right direction.

Let's make work suck less,

Peter