"We don't save lives" and other things I tell myself to remember it isn't that deep

There was a stretch in my corporate life where I genuinely believed that a delayed report was a kind of emergency. Somebody would mark an email urgent, then follow it with a message asking if I had seen the urgent email, and my whole nervous system would react like the building was on fire. I would stay late, skip lunch, answer at ten at night, and the reward for all of that was the privilege of doing it again the next day. Nobody ever stopped to ask whether the thing was actually urgent. Urgent was just the temperature the whole place ran at.

It took me a long time to see that for what it was, which is a culture that confuses motion with importance. When everything is a fire, nothing is, and you spend your best energy sprinting between things that mostly did not need you to sprint. The cost is not just your evenings, It is your judgment. You stop being able to tell the difference between a real problem and a loud one, and the loud ones almost always win.

So now I have a line I come back to whenever that old panic starts to rise. “We don't save lives.” I am not in an operating room. The vast majority of what lands on my desk, even the stuff stamped urgent in red, can wait an hour, or a day, or sometimes forever, and the world keeps turning. That is not me being careless about the work. I care enormously about the work. It is me refusing to treat a late invoice like a heart attack, because treating everything like a heart attack is how you burn out the people who actually keep the place running.

When something comes in hot now, I run it through three quick questions before I let it touch my calendar. First, what actually happens if this waits until tomorrow? Not the dramatic version, the real version. Second, am I the only person who can handle this, or does it just feel that way because I answered the email? And third, is this urgent, or is it just someone else's lack of planning landing on me with a deadline attached? Most things fall apart under those three questions. The fire turns out to be a candle, and I can deal with a candle on Tuesday.

The part nobody warns you about is that the urgency does not always come from other people. I left corporate America in part because the pace was costing me more than the paycheck was worth, and then I went and built a company, where the fires are now mine and the late nights are nobody's fault but my own. So I have to watch myself just as closely as I ever watched a bad manager. The reflex to make everything an emergency does not disappear when you become the boss. If anything it gets easier to feed, because now the business really is yours and every small thing feels personal. The three questions are as much for me as for anyone.

What I have found is that the calmer I am about what is genuinely urgent, the faster the real emergencies get handled, because I have not already spent my whole day fighting imaginary ones. Saving your intensity for the things that deserve it is not laziness. It is the only way to still have intensity left when something truly does.

So that is the thing I keep telling myself, and I will keep telling myself, probably forever. It isn't that deep. Run the business, do good work, protect the energy that lets you do good work, and let the candles burn until Tuesday.

Do you work somewhere that treats everything like a five-alarm fire, or are you the one lighting the matches? Tell me, and stick around for more!