Catherine joined a fast growing grocery delivery startup as its new operations manager. This is a story about urgency culture at work, and how a habit of labeling everything urgent can quietly become a way to control a team’s attention rather than a response to real business pressure.

The company was scaling fast. Investors were pleased. During her interview, the founder, Todd, told her that speed of response was exactly what separated them from their slow, clumsy competitors.

Why Constant Urgency Feels Like High Performance

From day one, Catherine felt a pace that was almost physically tangible.

Messages marked urgent landed in the team chat even at eleven at night. Meetings were called fifteen minutes before they started. Todd repeated a phrase so often it became the company’s unofficial motto: we do not have time for slow decisions, the market will not wait.

At first, Catherine admired the energy. She felt she had finally landed in an environment that truly wanted to win, instead of one that drifted through a slow, predictable office rhythm. She started answering messages instantly, even on weekends, trying to anticipate problems before they surfaced.

Six months in, something shifted. Even in the rare moments when nothing urgent was actually happening, she felt anxious if her phone stayed quiet for more than half an hour. She started waking up at night to check her work email. Her partner once pointed out that she could not finish a movie without glancing at her phone.

She told herself this was simply her personality, that she was a responsible person who took work seriously. This is one of the clearest early signs of workplace burnout: mistaking constant anxiety for dedication.

The Moment That Exposed the Pattern

The turning point came by accident.

Catherine fell ill and spent three days at home with a high fever, physically unable to check messages. She was certain that by the time she returned, at least one major process would have collapsed without her.

When she came back, nothing had collapsed. The team had resolved two situations on their own, situations that normally would have been escalated to her as urgent. A young analyst named Marcus mentioned, almost in passing, that without a steady stream of urgent labels from Todd, the team actually found it easier to set priorities on their own.

That sentence stayed with her. Instead of simply riding along with the pace, she started quietly observing the pattern behind it.

She noticed three things:

• Many messages marked urgent were ordinary questions that could have waited until morning.
• Urgent labels spiked whenever the team discussed something outside Todd’s current instructions, such as a process improvement or a resourcing question.
• The word urgent was doing less work as a signal of importance and more work as a way to redirect attention.

Fake Urgency by the Numbers: Running the Experiment

Catherine decided to test the pattern directly instead of relying on instinct.

For one month, she logged every message marked urgent. She recorded the time it was sent and whether it genuinely required an immediate response or could have waited a few hours.

The results were striking. Out of forty three messages marked urgent, only six involved truly time sensitive operational issues, such as a delivery system outage or a complaint from a major client. The remaining thirty seven were ordinary work matters dressed up as emergencies.

A second pattern emerged. Urgent messages from Todd spiked precisely during the periods when employees started asking about company strategy, financial performance, or the profitability timeline that kept getting pushed back. A constant sense of crisis seemed to pull the team’s attention away from slower, harder, more fundamental questions about where the company was actually headed.

Catherine decided to test that suspicion directly, and this is where the story turned.

She asked the finance department for access to basic company metrics, citing operational resource planning as her reason. The numbers told a different story than the one repeated at all hands meetings. The startup had shown almost no real revenue growth for nearly a year. The growth Todd described mostly existed in investor presentations built on optimistic projections rather than actual results.

The Real Cost of Toxic Startup Culture

Constant urgency was not a byproduct of explosive real growth. It was a way to disguise the absence of growth.

While the team rushed between emergency labels handling supposedly critical tasks, no one had time to ask a simple question: why, after two years of hard work, had the company still not come close to the profitability it had promised investors.

Catherine understood that the atmosphere of permanent fire drills served a purpose nobody named out loud. It kept people from ever pausing long enough to notice inconsistencies, ask uncomfortable questions, or compare promises with actual numbers. In this kind of toxic startup culture, urgency is not a byproduct of business processes. It is a tool for managing where a team’s attention goes.

Catherine did not stage a public confrontation. Instead, she introduced a simple rule within her part of the team: any message marked urgent had to include a short explanation of why it could not wait until the next business day.

At first, this irritated Todd. Over time, the number of pseudo urgent messages in her department dropped by nearly half. The team, oddly enough, became just as effective, and in some cases more precise, because decisions stopped being made in a panic.

A few months later, Catherine left the company. Not burned out, the way several of her colleagues had before her, but calm, with a clear understanding of what had happened, and one rule she carried to her next job: speed of response and genuine urgency are not the same thing. The difference between them often determines who is really in control of someone’s attention.

Key takeaway: Constant urgency at work does not always signal real business demands. Sometimes it is a convenient tool that leaves people no time to stop, think, and notice what someone else would rather keep hidden