Get rid of your ASAP requests

Making urgent the default state of your creative environment is simply stupid.

If someone would ask me which do I think is the most poisoning behavior in creative environments , that would be without a doubt what I call the ASAP syndrome.

This is the idea under which many creative organizations operate these days , that absolutely everything starting from the most trivial to the most important task has to be done as soon as possible ,this sounds something like : “hey guys they are waiting for us on this one “ , “We don´t have to0 much time “ , “this has to be done for yesterday” etc … basically this assumption that absolutely everything is urgent like if we were actually building a spaceship that would save humanity from an imminent disaster.

Of course we all we want to deliver our best work and we want to do it on schedule (which most of the times are poorly planned and contribute to put everyone at their edge). I get it, is hard to feel and live by this pressure, but putting everyone else around you in an hysteric environment actually does not help much .

I personally think we tend to push our peers to do stuff as soon as possible for two reasons.The first one as a mediocre way of transferring our anxiety and pressure to someone else , by telling someone something is urgent , I deceive myself and feel that I´m removing some part of the responsibility by expressing this state of emergency to someone else. What you are actually doing is telling that person your freaking out and that you don't feel you´re on top on the situation. At the end of the day you should always assume complete responsibility over your work and those who work for you that´s the only way you can put yourself in a position where you can solve problems .

The second one is just plain ignorance of what you are asking someone to perform for you ,the more ignorant you are about a task you need someone else to do for you ,the more fear end uncertainty produces you and the more compelled you feel to put pressure on that person to do it as fast as possible. So better learn as much as possible from what you are asking other people do for you, It will enhance your ability to delegate work better.

The main problem of making everything urgent by default on your organization is that people start loosing sight between the difference of important and urgent , if everything simply gets piled up in the urgent stuff it will always be easier just to do trivial urgent stuff than the actual important things that should be addressed, besides creating an unnecessary permanent state of drama and hysteria which produces people to burn out or that simply constrains them from doing their best work.

Here´s an extract of one of my favorite books called REWORK that describes much better why this is such a bad practice.

“Stop saying ASAP .We get it . It´s implied everyone wants things done as soon as they can be done .When you turn into one of these people who adds ASAP to the end of every request , you´re saying everything is high priority .Ad when everything is high priority nothing is .(Funny how everything is a top priority until you actually have to prioritize things.) ASAP is inflationary .It devaluates any request that doesn´t say ASAP . Before you know it , the only way to get anything done is by putting the ASAP sticker on it.”

So next time you feel the necessity to ask someone to do something ASAP suck it up and let people just do their thing , and just leave this tag for moments when its absolutely necessary.