Stop, Drop and Scroll: Surviving Fake Urgency at Work

"URGENT!!" lands at 4:52 pm on a Friday. Your heart rate goes up, your weekend plans go down, and you deliver it by 8 pm. On Tuesday, you notice nobody has opened it. Welcome to fake urgency at work: the habit of making every request sound like the building is on fire, when most of the time it is a candle somebody forgot about. This post is for the people starting those fires, the people putting them out, and the teams stuck in the smoke.

Executive coach Dina Denham Smith puts the cost plainly in Harvard Business Review: when everything is urgent, there is little room left for creative, deep work. And because almost all of that urgency arrives as a notification, the fake fire is really a notification problem with a human behind it.

Anatomy of a fake fire

Fake urgency has a recognizable look in your notifications. See how many of these you received this week:

• "URGENT" in the subject line of something due next week.
• @channel or @here for a question only one person can answer.
• "ASAP" with no date, so nobody knows if that means an hour or a month.
• The lonely "?" sent five minutes after the first message.
• The red exclamation mark on an email that turns out to be an FYI.
• "Quick call?" with no agenda, which is neither quick nor, usually, a call that needed to happen.

None of these are crimes on their own. Together, they train everyone on the team to treat every ping as a five-alarm fire.

Why fake fires work on your brain

Researchers Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee named it the mere urgency effect: people tend to pick tasks with a short deadline over tasks with a bigger payoff, even when there is plenty of time for both. In one of their experiments, about 35% of people chose the lower-paying task when it came with a tight deadline, compared with about 14% when it did not (SmartCompany). A deadline grabs attention, and the size of what is at stake fades into the background.

Fake urgency hijacks exactly that reflex. The word "URGENT" does not make a task more important. It just makes it impossible to ignore.

What fake fires actually cost

• Focus. The average worker is already interrupted every 2 minutes during core hours (Microsoft Work Trend Index). Every fake fire adds one more, with extra adrenaline.
• Real emergencies. When everything is marked urgent, nothing is. The genuine fire arrives looking exactly like the forty fake ones before it, and gets the same tired response.
• People. The receivers of constant fires burn out first, and they are often the most reliable people on the team, because they are the ones who always answer.

For fire starters: are you holding the matches?

Hardly anyone starts fires on purpose. Usually it comes from anxiety, from pressure passed down from above, or from simply not knowing the real deadline. Before you hit send on something marked urgent, run a three-question check:

1. Is there a real deadline? If you cannot name a date and time, it is not urgent yet.
2. What breaks if this waits until tomorrow? If the honest answer is "nothing", say so.
3. Who actually needs this? One person, not the whole channel.

Then label it honestly: "For Thursday's meeting", "No rush, this week is fine", or, when it really is a fire, "Urgent: the client demo is at 3 pm today". Research with over 4,000 people found that receivers overestimate how fast senders need a reply, and that stating your real expectation removes much of the stress (Giurge and Bohns, 2021). One honest line saves someone an evening.

For fire receivers: don't run into every building

You cannot control what others send, but you can control what earns a sprint. Try the 30-second triage: look for a real deadline, a real consequence, and a reason it has to be you. If two of the three are missing, it is probably smoke.

Then ask, kindly, for the information the sender left out:

• "Happy to help. What time do you need this by?"
• "I'm in the middle of [task]. Is end of day OK, or should I switch now?"
• "Is this for a specific meeting? Then I'll make sure it's ready for that."

One more uncomfortable truth: every time a fake fire gets an instant reply, the sender learns that "URGENT" works. Answering at the speed something actually needs is not being difficult. It is how teams unlearn the habit. If you need help switching off, see To Mute or Not to Mute and The Right to Disconnect.

A team fire code

The lasting fix is a shared language for urgency, so nobody has to guess. Four labels cover almost everything:

Add two simple rules: @channel and @here only for things that affect everyone and need action today, and a quick monthly look back at false alarms. Our manager's guide to notification norms has more on getting a team to agree on rules like these, and the notification habits of high-performing teams shows what it looks like when it works.

Imagine notifications that knew the difference

Most of this post exists because our tools treat every message the same way. A real outage and a forgotten slide request arrive with the same sound, the same banner and the same red dot. If your notifications could tell a real fire from a smoke machine, half the stress in this post would disappear before it reached you. Until then, a shared fire code and a little honesty go a very long way.

Frequently asked questions

What is false urgency at work?

False urgency is when requests are presented as more time-critical than they really are, for example "URGENT" on something due next week. It interrupts focus, causes stress and makes real emergencies harder to spot.

How do I respond to fake urgent requests?

Ask for the missing information politely: what time it is needed by, and what happens if it waits. Then answer at the speed the task actually needs. Instant replies to fake fires teach people to keep starting them.

How can teams label message priority?

Agree on a few shared labels, such as Now, Today, This week and FYI, with one channel for real emergencies, and limit @channel and @here to things that affect everyone and need action today.

What is the mere urgency effect?

It is the tendency to choose tasks with short deadlines over more important tasks with bigger payoffs, even when there is time for both. It was described by researchers Zhu, Yang and Hsee in 2018.

Not every ping is a fire. Learning to tell the difference might be the most underrated skill at work.