GTD 2006.38: Getting out of Work Crisis Mode

Whether you call it “putting out fires all day” or “perpetual reorg” or just plain insanity, are you permanently stuck in Work Crisis Mode? You know what this looks like: lurching from mini work crisis to crisis meeting to crisis conference call about the meeting on the crisis to 100 emails in your inbox to meeting to the end of the day collapse.

The most evil thing about Work Crisis Mode is it’s become the new normal. A lot of organizations have institutionalized Work Crisis Mode kind of on the theory that the rats run faster if electric shocks are sent through the maze a few times an hour. Maybe they do – they also start biting their own tails and dropping dead of heart attacks.

So how do you get out of Crisis Mode?

First recognize what a real crisis is. Here are a couple of definitions from wordreference.com:

• A crucial stage or turning point in the course of something.
• An unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty.

Second, start investing some time in determining what the root of today’s crisis is. What can you learn from it? What can you do to change why it happened in the first place?

Crises do not, and should not happen every day, or every week or every month. Nearly all work crises are incompetent planning, shoddy execution and/or miscommunication masquerading as a “crisis” so those responsible (possibly including you) can escape blame.

Third, just say no. Refuse to play the crisis game. Do what you have to do, but don’t imbue it with the more importance or urgency that the situation really warrants. Don’t get caught up in Crisis Mode as an excuse, either for letting other things slide or not applying Getting Things Done.

Finally, if the organization you’re in is driven by people with a penchant of treating everything from a lack of office supplies to the numbers of the day as crisis, recognize it’s time to move on.

Remember, you are not a lab rat!

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Comments

[Bob Walsh]

Steve, Thomas - Exactly! False urgency corrupts and absolutely false urgency corrupts both the people selling it and the people buying into it.

Yet, this is the IT culture. Micro-ISVs can't afford to act like this.

[Steve Schapel]

If a client contacts me with an "urgent" request (and if I know them well enough to get away with it ;-) ), I usually ask something like "Is this 'somebody is going to die' urgent, or 'you might be late for lunch' urgent?"

[Thomas]

I used to have days of constant firefighting, and thought about printing up the following as a big poster:

"Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."

Unfortunately, I never quite got round to it, as I think my then-manager would have had a sense-of-humour failure...