The notification pops in the lower right of the screen. A muted chime, but the flash of red is what your body responds to. It’s 4:48 PM on a Friday. The subject line is just one word, capitalized: URGENT. Your stomach does a familiar little flip, a mix of adrenaline and dread. Your boss needs a full market analysis for a meeting on Monday morning. A meeting that has been sitting on your shared calendar for the last 48 days. It’s a slow-motion car crash of someone else’s poor planning, and your weekend is the airbag.
I’d love to stand on a pedestal and condemn this whole charade, but here’s the ugly truth: a part of me, a small, shame-filled part, sometimes enjoys it. There’s a perverse thrill in being the one who can pull it off, in turning chaos into a coherent spreadsheet by 8 AM Monday. It feels like a superpower. For a fleeting moment, you are indispensable. But it’s a trap. It’s the same short-term hit of validation that keeps the cycle going, rewarding reactive scrambling over proactive strategy. You become the go-to person for crises, and soon, your entire job is just a series of other people’s emergencies.
“I’ve been on the other side, too. I once created a P0 fire drill for our entire procurement team because I failed to check inventory for a project kickoff. For weeks, the task ‘Confirm Component Availability’ sat on my board, getting pushed back for more ‘urgent’ things. When the day came, I discovered we had zero. I framed my request as a company-critical emergency, a potential multi-million dollar disaster. And it was, but the crisis was entirely of my own making. My adrenaline felt like importance, but it was just the chemical manifestation of my own incompetence.”
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It’s a bit like the diet I decided to start at 4 PM yesterday. A noble goal, maybe, but the timing reveals a total failure of foresight, a reactive lurch instead of a planned journey. You don’t start a marathon at the 26-mile mark.
The real work isn’t done in the panic room; it’s done in the planning phase.
I was thinking about this when I read an article about a man named Jax S.K., a professional water sommelier. His job is to distinguish the subtle mineral notes of water from different aquifers, to tell you the story of its journey through volcanic rock or limestone beds. Imagine sending Jax an email at 4:48 PM. “URGENT: Need you to taste these 18 spring waters from different alpine regions and have the full tasting notes and mouthfeel profiles ready for the morning.” The request itself is an absurdity. It’s a fundamental disrespect for the craft. The entire value of his work is in the time it takes, in the calibration of his palate, in the focused, unhurried thought.
The world of horticulture is perhaps the most powerful rebuke to this entire culture of manufactured urgency. The success of a harvest is determined months before the first sprout, in the quiet, patient work of preparation. You analyze the soil, you plan the nutrient schedules, you understand the light cycles. The entire outcome hinges on the quality and stability of your starting materials, which is why growers spend so much time choosing the right feminized cannabis seeds to ensure genetic consistency and a predictable yield.
The Broken System
The system is broken. We financially and socially reward the person who works all weekend to fix a server crash, but we barely acknowledge the person whose careful maintenance prevented 28 crashes from ever happening. The hero is visible; the planner is not. The result is a workforce perpetually on edge, where deep, meaningful work is impossible because it’s constantly being interrupted by the next self-inflicted crisis. It kills creativity and institutionalizes anxiety.
Visible Reward
Invisible Value
The constant context-switching fragments our attention into useless shards. Your brain, by the end of the day, feels like a browser with 88 tabs open, all of them playing a different YouTube video. You’re busy, but you are not productive. You’re just treading water in a sea of someone else’s poor planning.
A Path Forward
This isn’t a sustainable way to build a company, a product, or a career. It leads to burnout, high turnover, and a culture where the most valued skill is not strategic thinking but the ability to tolerate chronic stress. We’re building houses of cards on foundations of sand, and then celebrating the people who are fastest at taping the cards back together when they inevitably fall. We’ve mistaken activity for achievement and urgency for importance.
Anything of lasting value, whether it’s a career, a company, or a living thing, is grown with patience. You cannot demand a harvest the day after you plant the seed.