The coffee, already cold, tasted like a metallic regret. My temples throbbed, a relentless drumbeat against the silence of the 4 AM office. Another “urgent” deliverable, another dawn greeting me through smeared windows. I swore I’d never fall for it again, yet here I was, tapping out reports on a project that, by all honest accounts, could have waited another 4 weeks, maybe even 44. The air conditioning hummed, a lonely companion, as my stomach growled, protesting the diet I’d optimistically started at 4 PM yesterday. The fluorescent lights cast long, stark shadows, making the empty desks seem like tombstones for lost weekends. It felt like an endless cycle, a corporate Sisyphus rolling a rock of manufactured crises up a hill, only for it to roll back down with the next quarterly “pivot.”
Manufactured Crises vs. True Urgency
This isn’t about the individual sprint; it’s about the systemic marathon of manufactured crises. We’ve all seen it: the executive who bursts into a meeting, demanding an immediate pivot, a “game-changing” new initiative that requires 234 percent of everyone’s focus right now. Teams scramble, weekends vanish, sleep becomes a luxury, all to launch something shiny that, three months later, has amassed a grand total of 12 visitors and the executive who championed it has moved on to their next “urgent” conquest, leaving behind a trail of exhausted goodwill and dead-end projects.
My mistake?
