"The Sky Is Falling!!!!!"

Ok Chicken Littles, this one’s for you.

1. Fast decisions are not always good decisions.

2. Treating everything as an emergency means nothing is an emergency.

3. Your emergency does not become someone else’s emergency because you say so.

4. People need timeline context to triage appropriately.

• No: "Need alpaca thing ASAP!!!!!!!!!!!"

• Good: “I need the alpaca project wrapped up by 5pm tomorrow.”

• Better: “Can the alpaca project be wrapped up by 5pm tomorrow?”

• Best: "This is urgent because it impacts the alpaca project launch. Are you the right person to help with this, and if so, do you have capacity to prioritize it? If not, when could you commit to, or who else should I talk to?"

If you are not a medical professional or first responder, this applies to you.

Things that are an emergency:

• Heart attack

• Wildfire

• Mission critical system outage

• Rabid alpacas

Things that are not an emergency:

• I forgot to do this

• Someone asked me for something

• I waited until the last minute

• This is really important to me, so it should be really important to everyone else, too

Most workplace emergencies are actually planning failures, communication failures, prioritization failures, or staffing failures standing on each other’s shoulders inside of a trench coat.

If everything really is an emergency all the time, and you're not one of the emergency responders mentioned above, get with your Project and Operations teams. They can help.

And if your urgent resolution process includes a ticketing system, three Slack messages, a Teams call, a text message, and some version of "And then you need to ping Francisco..."

Please get with them even sooner.