THE COST OF NOW: The Urgency We Create Together
There is a very convenient way to talk about modern urgency.
Blame someone else.
Customers are impatient.
Employers demand too much.
Managers can't plan.
Employees expect everything immediately.
Amazon ruined delivery expectations.
Smartphones ruined communication.
Social media destroyed attention.
Technology accelerated everything.
AI will make it worse.
There is truth in all of those statements.
Just not enough truth.
Because the uncomfortable reality is that most of us occupy several positions in the system at once.
I'm a business owner.
And a customer.
A supplier.
And a client.
A parent.
A husband.
A person who wants people to respect my time.
And a person who occasionally catches himself wondering why somebody hasn't fucking replied yet.
That's the problem.
We experience urgency differently depending on which side of the request we're standing.
When somebody wants something from me immediately, I notice the intrusion.
When I want something from them immediately, I notice the importance.
Same mechanism.
Different perspective.
Which makes it very difficult to point at one group and say:
They created this.
We did.
Collectively.
One perfectly understandable behaviour at a time.
The customer asks because faster would be nice
Start with the customer.
They aren't necessarily unreasonable.
They've got a problem.
A deadline.
A birthday.
A meeting.
A broken machine.
A client waiting.
They ask:
“Any chance you could get it to me tomorrow?”
Nothing wrong with asking.
The business thinks:
We probably can.
Maybe if we squeeze it.
Maybe if we move something.
Maybe if somebody stays slightly later.
And the business wants the order.
So:
“Yes.”
Customer delighted.
Fantastic service.
They come back.
Next time, tomorrow isn't extraordinary.
It's the service they received last time.
Research into service waiting shows how strongly expectations shape experience. Customers respond to waits partly against what they expected, and businesses themselves can create those expectations when they communicate service times. Once a faster standard has been established, it becomes part of the reference point against which future service is judged.
The customer didn't force the business to promise tomorrow.
The business chose to.
But the customer rewarded it.
Now both have learned something.
The business promises because speed wins
The company isn't necessarily trying to destroy anybody's work-life balance.
It's competing.
Someone else offers next day.
Someone else replies within an hour.
Someone else opens Sunday.
Someone else offers same-day collection.
Customers notice speed.
The business responds.
That's markets doing what markets do.
Businesses improve services people value.
The problem is that improvement doesn't sit still.
Today's differentiator becomes tomorrow's expectation.
If one company can turn something around in forty-eight hours, another asks whether it can do twenty-four.
If twenty-four works, someone tries twelve.
Then customers start asking why everyone else still takes two days.
This is not evidence that customers are uniquely entitled.
Nor that businesses are uniquely greedy.
They're interacting.
Each response changes the environment the other responds to.
That is how norms form.
Then operations inherits the promise
Sales says yes.
Operations discovers what yes means.
This may be one of the oldest organisational problems in existence.
Customer:
“Can you do Friday?”
Sales:
“Absolutely.”
Operations:
“We can?”
Sales:
“They really need it.”
Ah.
That changes physics then.
Friday means the schedule moves.
Somebody's existing job gets displaced.
Production tightens.
Purchasing expedites something.
A supplier gets called.
The warehouse has less room for error.
The driver needs an earlier collection.
The original customer simply experiences:
Great service.
They don't see the compression travelling backwards through the organisation.
And why would they?
The company promised it.
From their perspective, everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do.
Which means the company has accidentally created evidence that the deadline was reasonable.
Heroics teach systems the wrong lesson
This is one of the most dangerous mechanisms in the entire series.
Something unrealistic is requested.
People stretch.
It gets done.
Everyone celebrates.
The obvious conclusion should sometimes be:
That was exceptional. We should avoid needing to do it again.
Instead, the system often learns:
Apparently that is possible.
Now exceptional effort becomes capacity.
Capacity becomes expectation.
The next request starts from the new baseline.
This happens because the sacrifice is invisible in the output.
The customer sees the job arrived Friday.
Management sees target achieved.
The spreadsheet says delivered.
It doesn't say:
Sarah skipped lunch.
Tom pushed another job back.
The supplier did us a favour.
Someone answered emails from home.
Quality control had half its normal window.
Everybody got lucky.
Systems learn from what they can see.
If they see success but not the cost, they can learn exactly the wrong thing.
Employees help build the expectation too
This is uncomfortable because it's easy to frame always-on culture as something employers simply impose.
Sometimes they do.
But research on mobile email found something more complicated years ago.
Knowledge workers adopted mobile email because it gave them flexibility, control and peace of mind.
They could deal with messages when it suited them.
Get ahead.
Work away from the office.
Clear something quickly.
Those individual choices gradually contributed to collective expectations of continuous connectivity.
Researchers called this the autonomy paradox: behaviour that felt individually autonomous helped construct a culture that ultimately reduced people's ability to disconnect.
Nobody needed to announce:
“From now on everyone must answer email at night.”
People demonstrated that answering at night was possible.
Others copied.
Managers observed.
Clients learned.
Norms shifted.
We did it together.
The sender doesn't even realise what they created
Sometimes the system accelerates without anybody actually wanting it to.
The email-urgency research from Laura Giurge and Vanessa Bohns is a brilliant example.
Across eight preregistered studies involving more than 4,000 participants, people receiving non-urgent work emails outside normal hours believed senders expected faster replies than the senders actually did.
The sender thought:
“I'll send it now so I don't forget.”
The receiver thought:
“I'd better deal with this.”
That mismatch generated stress for the receiver, and explicitly saying that no immediate response was required reduced the problem.
Nobody demanded urgency.
The sender created a signal.
The receiver inferred urgency.
The receiver answered.
Now the sender sees that this person answers at night.
Next time, perhaps the sender expects that slightly more.
A culture can accelerate without anyone deciding it should.
That's fascinating.
And slightly terrifying.
We become the evidence for the expectation
This may be the mechanism underneath everything.
Every time we comply with unnecessary immediacy, we provide evidence that immediacy was reasonable.
Reply in two minutes.
Evidence.
Take the impossible deadline.
Evidence.
Work through lunch.
Evidence.
Deliver overnight.
Evidence.
Answer on holiday.
Evidence.
Squeeze the customer in.
Evidence.
Of course, sometimes there are excellent reasons to do all of those things.
The problem is repetition.
Systems don't easily distinguish:
Adam chose to make an exception because this mattered
from:
Adam can do this.
Unless Adam makes the distinction visible.
The same is true of businesses.
The customer doesn't know that next-day delivery required heroics unless someone tells them.
They simply know next-day delivery happened.
What gets experienced as generosity can later return as expectation.
Technology removes the friction that once restrained us
Then technology enters the loop.
Communication used to have friction.
Delivery had friction.
Information had friction.
Payments had friction.
Work allocation had friction.
Many of those frictions were pointless.
Removing them was good.
But friction also limited volume.
Writing and posting twenty letters required effort.
Sending twenty emails does not.
Tracking employees manually was difficult.
Digital systems can do it continuously.
Allocating hundreds of jobs manually required management time.
Algorithms can organise, monitor and evaluate work at scale.
The International Labour Organization defines algorithmic management as systems using data to organise, assign, monitor, supervise and evaluate work. Its research in logistics and healthcare found real benefits in efficiency and process simplification alongside risks including surveillance and potential deterioration in job quality, with outcomes varying considerably by context and implementation.
Again, technology doesn't demand speed by itself.
It makes speed easier to demand.
That's different.
Once measurement improves, waiting becomes visible
Imagine running a delivery business forty years ago.
A driver leaves.
You have a rough idea where they are.
They return later.
Now imagine a modern system.
Location.
Route.
Stops completed.
Minutes at each location.
Estimated arrival.
Idle time.
Performance.
Exceptions.
Everything measurable.
Measurement can improve safety, efficiency and customer experience enormously.
But it also changes what organisations can expect.
If the system reveals that a route can theoretically be completed twelve minutes faster, those twelve minutes become visible.
Perhaps there is genuine waste.
Remove it.
Excellent.
But optimisation has no natural stopping point.
The technology cannot decide:
This is efficient enough and the remaining ten minutes should belong to the human being.
Somebody has to make that judgement.
Otherwise every measurable gap eventually starts looking like an opportunity.
The employee adapts
Now imagine you're the worker inside the system.
You know responsiveness is valued.
You know customers prefer speed.
You know colleagues answer quickly.
You know the dashboard measures output.
So you adapt.
You answer faster.
Move faster.
Keep an eye on messages.
Reduce gaps.
Research on workplace telepressure describes the preoccupation and urge employees can develop around responding quickly to message-based communication. The important part is that pressure no longer needs to arrive as a direct managerial order. It can become internalised.
Eventually you don't need the boss to say:
“Reply now.”
You feel you should.
The organisation has moved inside your head.
That is an incredibly efficient system.
Then the manager plans around the adapted employee
The employee who always replies becomes the employee assumed to reply.
The employee who continually rescues deadlines becomes the safe person to give another difficult deadline.
The team that repeatedly delivers under pressure gets another ambitious target.
The department that does more with less demonstrates that perhaps it can do with even less.
Again, nobody necessarily intends harm.
Managers are responding to observed capability.
But observed capability may include invisible overextension.
And if overextension is never measured, it gets misclassified as ordinary capacity.
This is why wellbeing discussions often arrive after workload discussions.
Workload is visible.
The cost of carrying it may not be.
The manager is under pressure too
It's easy to turn managers into villains.
Usually inaccurate.
Their customer is chasing.
Their director is chasing.
Their board is chasing.
Their own targets are visible.
Their inbox is full.
So they transfer pressure.
“Where are we with this?”
“Need an update.”
“Can we accelerate?”
“Client is asking.”
The employee experiences management pressure.
The manager experiences customer pressure.
The customer experiences their own deadline.
And perhaps the customer's deadline came from somebody else entirely.
Where exactly is the villain?
Sometimes there is one.
Sometimes someone genuinely behaves appallingly.
But frequently there is merely a chain of humans passing urgency to the next available human.
That is a systems problem.
This is how urgency acquires momentum
Imagine a simple sequence.
Customer wants something a little earlier.
Sales wants to delight customer.
Operations wants to honour sales commitment.
Manager wants operations to succeed.
Employee wants manager to trust them.
Supplier wants to retain the account.
Courier wants good performance metrics.
Everyone makes a perfectly understandable decision.
Nobody thinks:
I would like to create an unhealthy urgency culture today.
Yet the result is exactly that.
The system outcome is not always anyone's intended outcome.
That is the crucial point.
We reward speed
Customers reward speed with purchases.
Managers reward responsiveness with trust.
Colleagues reward helpfulness with gratitude.
Businesses reward output.
Platforms reward engagement.
People who answer quickly get more conversation.
People who solve things get more problems.
Businesses that deliver quickly get more demand.
Success increases exposure to the thing that produced the success.
Then the cycle accelerates.
Research on the mere urgency effect adds another layer: people can favour tasks with short completion windows over objectively more valuable tasks even when ordinary rational reasons for doing so have been controlled for. Urgency itself can influence behaviour.
So the system isn't merely socially rewarding urgency.
Our attention can already be biased towards it.
We've built an environment that continually presses a button humans were already inclined to respond to.
And then customers adapt again
The organisation gets faster.
The customer notices.
Yesterday:
Three days.
Today:
Tomorrow.
The faster service becomes the new comparison point.
Research into customer waiting confirms that expectations matter strongly in how service is judged rather than objective duration alone.
So the customer isn't irrational when tomorrow becomes expected.
The environment taught them tomorrow.
Now another business has to match it.
And around we go.
Capability.
Expectation.
Pressure.
Adaptation.
New capability.
New expectation.
Nobody needs to coordinate this process.
It emerges.
This is what makes acceleration hard to reverse
If urgency came from one bad rule, delete the rule.
Easy.
If one manager created the problem, replace the manager.
If one app created it, remove the app.
But social acceleration is more complicated because expectations become distributed through entire systems.
Research testing Hartmut Rosa's framework found workers could distinguish demands associated with technological acceleration, changing social expectations and an increasing pace of work.
The relevance here isn't proving that every dimension of life is objectively speeding up.
It is recognising that technology, social norms and pace can interact.
Remove one and the others may remain.
Ban evening email but retain impossible workloads.
People still work late.
Tell customers response times are longer but incentivise staff entirely on speed.
They still hurry.
Remove notifications but praise employees who reply instantly.
The norm survives.
Systems are annoyingly good at recreating the behaviour they reward.
We even create urgency for ourselves
This is perhaps the most embarrassing part.
Not all the pressure comes from outside.
I can create an expectation nobody asked for.
I decide I should answer today.
I decide this should be finished before lunch.
I decide an empty afternoon should be filled.
I decide that because AI lets me create three things, I should create three things.
Nobody imposed the deadline.
I imported the culture.
That is how deeply systems eventually work.
You no longer need external pressure when you've learned to manufacture it internally.
Businesses fear disappointing customers
Customers fear missing out.
Employees fear looking uncommitted.
Managers fear appearing slow.
Suppliers fear losing accounts.
Leaders fear competitors.
Everybody speeds up because somebody else might punish slowness.
Sometimes they will.
Sometimes they won't.
But nobody particularly wants to be the first person to test it.
This is how collective behaviour gets locked in.
Each individual choice can be rational even when the collective outcome is ridiculous.
Imagine a room where everyone stands up
One person stands because they can't see.
The person behind now can't see.
They stand.
Then the person behind them.
Eventually everyone is standing.
Nobody has improved their view.
Everybody is less comfortable.
But sitting down individually makes your view worse unless everyone else sits down too.
That is roughly how some forms of urgency work.
A company cannot easily slow its service if competitors remain fast.
An employee may struggle to disconnect if every colleague remains connected.
A manager who stops chasing may fear their team appears slower than another.
A customer may request rapid service because they know rapid service exists.
Individually rational.
Collectively exhausting.
This is why “just set boundaries” can be correct and completely insufficient at the same time.
Organisations can become urgent by default
Emerging research is beginning to examine organisational cultures built around urgency explicitly.
A 2025 Academy of Management study using three-wave data from 358 full-time employees found organisational urgency associated with employees deferring recovery while prioritising additional work behaviours, with attentional tunnelling emerging as one explanatory mechanism. It is preliminary conference research, not a settled scientific verdict, but it offers a useful model of urgency as something embedded in an organisation's temporal culture rather than existing only inside individual tasks.
That matters.
Because once urgency becomes environmental, asking employees to manage it individually becomes slightly absurd.
The whole place is telling them:
Faster.
Sooner.
More.
Now.
And then somebody runs a resilience workshop.
The system cannot be fixed entirely from the receiving end
Turn notifications off.
Protect your diary.
Say no.
Block focus time.
All useful.
I do versions of them.
But those tools place responsibility on the person being interrupted.
What about the person creating the interruption?
What about the organisation creating the workload?
What about the customer expectation the company created?
What about the service promise sales made?
What about the leader modelling permanent availability?
What about the system rewarding response speed?
What about the technology making interruption frictionless?
If we only teach recipients to defend themselves better, we leave the demand-generation system untouched.
That's why this series needed to move beyond personal boundaries.
The problem is bigger.
The answer isn't collective slowness
Again, absolutely not.
Speed is valuable.
A competitive business should improve.
Technology should remove waste.
Customers should expect good service.
Employees should be responsive within reasonable expectations.
Managers should expect things to get done.
Suppliers should meet commitments.
None of this requires romanticising inefficiency.
The alternative to urgency culture is not everyone moving through treacle.
It is better discrimination.
Fast where speed creates value.
Slow where thought creates value.
Immediate where delay creates consequence.
Asynchronous where it doesn't.
Exceptional effort for exceptional situations.
Normal work for normal situations.
The problem is when those categories collapse.
We need a cost for urgency
At the moment, urgency can be remarkably cheap for the person creating it.
“Can you do this today?”
Five seconds to ask.
Potentially five hours of disruption elsewhere.
What if requesting urgency required acknowledging the trade?
“We need this today because X. If you move it forward, Y can wait.”
Now we're having a real conversation.
There is no free priority.
Something comes first because something else comes second.
Businesses should make that visible.
Managers too.
Customers occasionally.
Families as well.
Because once we acknowledge the displacement, urgency stops being an emotional adjective and becomes a decision.
Service promises need operational ownership
If sales promises next day, operations should have helped define whether next day is normal.
If leadership promises twenty-four-hour responsiveness, staffing should make that possible without expecting individuals to remain permanently available.
If a company advertises same-day service, the cost of same-day service should exist in the business model.
Not secretly inside somebody's evening.
This is what responsible convenience looks like.
Don't promise customers an experience that relies on employees repeatedly donating the difference.
Employees need to make exceptions visible
Capable people are terrible at this.
I know.
You rescue it.
No fuss.
Job done.
But perhaps sometimes the correct response afterwards is:
“We made that work, but here's what it required.”
Two jobs moved.
Three extra hours.
Supplier expedited.
Normal checking window reduced.
This is not moaning.
It is information.
Without it, the system sees only success.
And success becomes precedent.
Leaders need to model the tempo they actually want
If nobody needs to answer your 10pm email tonight, say so.
Or schedule it for tomorrow.
If something genuinely isn't urgent, don't perform urgency around it.
Don't turn your anxiety into everybody else's pace.
Don't ask for an update simply because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
Don't reward the person who sacrifices every boundary while ignoring the person whose systems prevented the crisis.
Culture is taught through repetition.
Every behaviour answers:
How do we do time here?
Customers can participate too
This is where it becomes personal again.
Do I genuinely need this tomorrow?
Does the person need chasing?
Am I asking or expecting?
Is there an actual consequence?
Did the business break a promise or merely fail to meet a deadline I invented?
Can I choose the slower delivery?
Can the waiter finish speaking to someone else?
Can the supplier have until Thursday?
Tiny questions.
But systems are built from tiny behaviours.
Technology should preserve slack rather than automatically consume it
This is the design challenge ahead.
If software saves ten minutes, perhaps we don't need to immediately schedule ten more minutes of output.
If AI saves two hours, perhaps some of the two hours should remain capacity.
If algorithms improve routing, perhaps every efficiency gain shouldn't become a tighter human target.
The ILO's work on algorithmic management is useful precisely because it finds different outcomes in different settings. Similar technological capabilities can support efficiency and job quality in some contexts while contributing to monitoring and intensified work in others.
Technology creates possibilities.
Institutions allocate them.
There is no innocent observer
That's probably the most uncomfortable sentence in this essay.
I can criticise clients for artificial urgency.
Then become an impatient customer.
Criticise managers for contacting people at night.
Then send messages when it suits me without clarifying expectations.
Criticise social media for demanding attention.
Then publish content because I want somebody's attention.
Criticise companies for increasing output.
Then use AI to produce more.
We are all participating in systems whose behaviour we sometimes dislike.
That doesn't mean everyone carries equal responsibility.
Power matters.
A chief executive can shape more norms than a junior employee.
A global platform can shape more expectations than one customer.
A major client can create more pressure than a tiny supplier.
Responsibility is uneven.
But uneven is not the same as nonexistent.
Collective problems need collective restraint
That word matters.
Restraint.
Not prohibition.
Not slowness.
The ability to possess a capability and decide not to use it every time.
I can contact you now.
I don't necessarily need to.
We can deliver tomorrow.
Not every customer needs tomorrow.
AI can create twenty versions.
Maybe we need three.
The employee can work tonight.
The deadline doesn't require it.
The manager can request another update.
Nothing has changed.
The company can increase the target again.
Maybe enough is enough.
Restraint is what stops capability automatically becoming expectation.
Without it, every technological improvement becomes another turn of the ratchet.
Perhaps we need to make “normal” respectable again
Normal response time.
Normal workload.
Normal lead time.
Normal effort.
Normal service.
Somewhere along the way normal began sounding mediocre.
Everything needs to be exceptional.
Delighted customers.
Super-responsive teams.
Lightning-fast turnaround.
Maximum productivity.
Always available.
Above and beyond.
But you cannot permanently operate above and beyond.
Once everyone does, beyond moves.
Then you need to go beyond beyond.
Exceptional only has meaning against a normal baseline.
If every customer receives emergency treatment, you don't have exceptional service.
You have an emergency operating model.
We should preserve the ability to surprise people with speed
This is one consequence I hadn't really considered before this series.
If tomorrow is always expected, tomorrow can no longer delight anybody.
If immediate replies are standard, fast replies have no value.
If employees constantly go above and beyond, above and beyond becomes invisible.
Perhaps reasonable baseline expectations actually preserve the possibility of exceptional service.
Most things happen at a sustainable pace.
Occasionally you say:
“Don't worry. We'll get this sorted tonight.”
And it genuinely means something.
That's better than pretending every night is available.
Urgency should be renewable only slowly
Think of it like organisational credit.
Use urgency occasionally and people respond.
Use it constantly and the account empties.
“Really need this.”
Yes.
“Really need this.”
Okay.
“Really need this.”
Again?
Eventually urgency becomes background noise.
Then genuine emergencies arrive into an environment already operating at maximum temporal volume.
There is nowhere left to go.
Healthy systems keep some capacity in reserve.
Attention too.
The urgency we create together can also be dismantled together
That is the hopeful part.
If collective behaviour created these expectations, collective behaviour can change them.
Not instantly.
Not perfectly.
But norms are learned.
They can be relearned.
Customers can accept transparent lead times.
Businesses can stop overpromising.
Managers can distinguish importance from immediacy.
Employees can stop using permanent availability as proof of commitment.
Leaders can protect slack.
Technology can be configured around asynchronous work.
AI gains can partly become time rather than only output.
We can stop rewarding artificial urgency.
We can stop turning every preference into somebody else's deadline.
No single action fixes the system.
That's fitting.
No single action created it.
Nobody planned this world
That's perhaps the point.
There wasn't a meeting where everyone agreed:
Let's create a society where increasingly powerful technologies save time while expectations expand fast enough to keep everybody feeling short of it.
Let's make communication instantaneous and then make silence suspicious.
Let's make delivery faster and then become annoyed by ordinary waiting.
Let's make work flexible and then remain reachable everywhere.
Let's reward responsiveness until people struggle to disconnect.
Nobody chose the whole system.
We chose pieces.
Customers wanted convenience.
Businesses wanted customers.
Workers wanted flexibility.
Managers wanted responsiveness.
Technology companies wanted useful products.
Leaders wanted productivity.
Each choice made sense locally.
Together they created something none of us necessarily intended.
That is what systems do.
Which means blame is less useful than awareness
Customers aren't the problem.
Businesses aren't the problem.
Technology isn't the problem.
Employees aren't the problem.
Managers aren't the problem.
Even urgency isn't the problem.
The problem is the loop.
Capability creates convenience.
Convenience creates expectation.
Expectation creates pressure.
Pressure changes behaviour.
Behaviour demonstrates capability.
Then the loop begins again.
Faster.
Again.
The way out isn't deciding which participant is morally defective.
It is interrupting the loop.
Somewhere.
Anywhere.
“I can do that tomorrow, but Thursday would be healthier.”
“No need to respond tonight.”
“Our normal turnaround is three days.”
“This genuinely isn't urgent.”
“We managed the rush, but it required exceptional effort.”
“AI saved us two hours. We're not immediately filling both.”
Tiny acts of temporal resistance.
Not against progress.
Against the assumption that every improvement must immediately become the new minimum.
We created now together
That may be the strange conclusion.
The culture of immediacy wasn't imposed on us from outside.
It emerged from interactions between things we genuinely value.
Convenience.
Reliability.
Service.
Flexibility.
Efficiency.
Technology.
Ambition.
Responsiveness.
All good things.
Taken individually.
But good things can produce bad systems when nothing limits their escalation.
Perhaps that is why fixing this requires more than learning to say no.
It requires learning when not to ask.
When not to promise.
When not to optimise.
When not to chase.
When not to convert a saving into another expectation.
When not to use every available piece of somebody else's capacity simply because the system has made it visible.
Because everybody wants more control over their time.
And everybody is simultaneously capable of reducing somebody else's.
There is no single villain.
There is just us.
Which is inconvenient.
But it also means we aren't powerless.
Sources And Further Reading
Melissa Mazmanian, Wanda J. Orlikowski and JoAnne Yates, “The Autonomy Paradox: The Implications Of Mobile Email Devices For Knowledge Professionals”, Organization Science (2013).
Research with knowledge professionals found mobile email initially provided flexibility, control and peace of mind while collective use simultaneously strengthened norms of continual connectivity and accessibility. The study provides a particularly useful example of individually rational behaviours collectively producing expectations that reduce autonomy.
Laura M. Giurge and Vanessa K. Bohns, “You Don't Need To Answer Right Away! Receivers Overestimate How Quickly Senders Expect Responses To Non-Urgent Work Emails”, Organizational Behavior And Human Decision Processes (2021).
Across eight preregistered studies involving 4,004 participants, receivers of non-urgent off-hours work email believed senders expected faster replies than senders actually did. Explicitly clarifying response-time expectations helped reduce the mismatch.
Larissa K. Barber and Alecia M. Santuzzi, “Please Respond ASAP: Workplace Telepressure And Employee Recovery”, Journal Of Occupational Health Psychology (2015).
Introduced workplace telepressure as the preoccupation and urge to respond quickly to message-based work communication, demonstrating how response expectations can become psychologically internalised rather than needing constant explicit enforcement.
Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher K. Hsee, “The Mere Urgency Effect”, Journal Of Consumer Research (2018).
Across five experiments, people sometimes selected objectively lower-payoff tasks because those tasks possessed spurious urgency. The findings demonstrate that urgency itself can influence prioritisation independently of objective consequence.
Delphine Caruelle, Line Lervik-Olsen and Anders Gustafsson, “The Clock Is Ticking—Or Is It? Customer Satisfaction Response To Waiting Shorter Vs. Longer Than Expected During A Service Encounter”, Journal Of Retailing (2023).
Across three studies, customer satisfaction depended partly on the relationship between expected and actual waiting time. The research demonstrates the importance of expectations as reference points, including the stronger effect when expectations are externally communicated by the service provider.
Heike Ulferts, Christian Korunka and Bettina Kubicek, “Acceleration In Working Life: An Empirical Test Of A Sociological Framework”, Time & Society (2013).
Two studies in office work and aviation services found workers could distinguish demands relating to technological acceleration, changing social expectations and an accelerating pace of work, providing empirical support for parts of Hartmut Rosa's social-acceleration framework in working life.
International Labour Organization and European Commission Joint Research Centre, “Algorithmic Management Practices In Regular Workplaces: Case Studies In Logistics And Healthcare” (2024).
Comparative research across France, Italy, India and South Africa found algorithmic management can streamline processes and improve efficiency while also creating risks around worker surveillance and job quality. Importantly, outcomes differed materially by geography, sector, regulation and implementation.
Didar Zeytun and Alicia A. Grandey, “Rush Or Rest: How Organizational Temporality Around Urgency Shapes Recovery”, Academy Of Management Proceedings (2025).
Using three-wave data from 358 full-time employees, the study found organisational urgency associated with deferred recovery and additional work behaviours, with attentional tunnelling identified as a mechanism. As conference proceedings research, it should be considered preliminary.
Research Gaps
There is no single established model proving the full “capability → expectation → pressure → behaviour → capability” loop proposed here.
The essay synthesises findings from customer expectations, responsiveness norms, organisational urgency, algorithmic management, social acceleration and behavioural psychology. Each component has empirical support, but the complete feedback-loop model is a conceptual synthesis rather than a validated scientific framework.
Responsibility within the system is not equally distributed.
The statement that “we created this together” should not imply that a junior employee, major corporation, consumer, executive and technology platform possess equal power to establish norms. Organisations and people with greater economic, managerial or technological power can shape temporal expectations far more strongly than individuals with limited bargaining power.
Competition can produce genuine welfare gains, not only escalating pressure.
Faster services, improved logistics, more responsive organisations and efficient technologies often save money, reduce inconvenience and improve quality of life. The fact that expectations subsequently adapt does not establish that the original improvement was undesirable.
Customer expectations do not automatically ratchet upwards forever.
Research shows expectations shape satisfaction, but customers can tolerate waits and may value reliability, quality, price or sustainability more than maximum speed. Different markets and customer groups will respond differently.
The autonomy-paradox research arose from an earlier generation of mobile email technology.
The original qualitative research involved mobile email devices in the mid-2000s. Its mechanism remains highly relevant, but contemporary smartphones, collaboration platforms and hybrid work create a substantially different technological environment that deserves updated longitudinal study.
Email urgency bias does not mean every after-hours message produces pressure.
The 2021 research identifies a systematic difference between sender and receiver expectations in the studied situations. Individual relationships, organisational norms and explicit agreements can reduce or eliminate the effect.
Algorithmic management is not inherently intensifying.
ILO research shows digital management systems can improve efficiency and simplify work. Negative effects vary substantially with design, labour institutions, regulation and organisational practice. The essay therefore treats technology as an amplifier of possible expectations rather than an autonomous cause.
Exceptional effort does not inevitably become expected capacity.
The claim that repeated heroic delivery can reset management expectations is plausible and recognisable, but stronger longitudinal research is needed to establish when organisations do or do not recalibrate workload after exceptional performance.
Organisational urgency remains an emerging research construct.
The 2025 study on organisational temporality around urgency provides useful preliminary evidence, but the empirical literature is still young. More peer-reviewed studies across industries and cultures are required.
Collective-action dynamics require more formal study.
The “everyone standing up to see” analogy suggests a coordination problem in which individually rational behaviour creates a collectively undesirable outcome. Economic and organisational research on coordination, arms races and social norms may provide useful theoretical parallels, but this essay does not establish one precise formal model.
It remains unclear how easily service expectations can be deliberately reset.
Businesses can communicate longer lead times or different response norms, but the success of such changes will depend on customer alternatives, market competition, trust and perceived value. More evidence is needed on whether deliberately slower but more predictable service can sustain customer satisfaction across different markets.
The concept of preserving some efficiency gains as slack is partly normative.
Research can evaluate the consequences of slack, workload and productivity, but it cannot determine the morally correct allocation of every efficiency improvement between customers, employees, owners and other stakeholders.
AI may significantly alter this feedback loop.
Generative AI can reduce the cost of producing communication, analysis and requests as well as completing tasks. Whether this ultimately intensifies the cycle, reduces workloads or creates a mixture of both remains an open empirical question.