“It’s urgent!”

When you hear a flustered customer utter these words, do you kick into high gear, get stressed out and start scrambling?

Have you taken on last minute requests that had you staying late at work, skipping personal appointments and sacrificing your sleep?

Did it turn out that the urgent task really wasn’t that urgent after all? The payout you got from the whole fiasco was a work product of reduced quality, poor productivity for the rest of the day, zero sense of accomplishment and massive eye bags.

It sounds like you got sucked into someone else’s false hustle.

The next time you hear that a task or project is “urgent”, do this:

• Take the word “urgent” with a pinch of salt.
• Negotiate on a more realistic timeline, and explain why more time is needed.
• Implement a priority surcharge if the job absolutely needs to be done within the short timeline; in my personal experience, the urgency miraculously disappears a lot of the time.
• If it’s likely to affect your overall performance and quality of work, don’t be afraid to say no.

Don’t feel like a mean or lazy person when you do the above. You just simply need to protect your resources and energy. You need to maintain your sanity, uphold your quality of work and stay productive and efficient so that you can be fair to your other customers.

Life’s too short to be hustled over a false hustle.