Today's Wednesday Wisdom is brought to you by Indra Books of Agility for All. Do you have a question? Post it in the comments.

 I have heard this similar story many times over the years, and  have even been victim to it myself in the early days of my career. Someone said, "I have several colleagues who mark every message or request as urgent or an emergency. I don't know what to do with these types of messages." 

We all know that it is virtually impossible for everything, especially if it can be sent by email to be an emergency, and we have all heard the expression, "poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part." So how do we work on this with our colleagues? 

First, create a canned response that you use consistently Every time you receive one of these messages. It might be something like this. "Please confirm that this request takes priority over the planned and scheduled work that we have already prioritized for this week," or, "Please provide a specific deadline for this request that aligns with our already prioritized work."

If this response doesn't work over time, sit down with the person and have a discussion about priorities. You might start with an explanation of how the team's time is prioritized and how it ties to the company's mission or goals. Then you can ask if there's something you can do to help this person manage the apparent high priority work that is coming late to the team.

For example, you might ask if the person is not being included in the right conversations so that their needs are heard and find out how you can resolve this issue. You may also need to seek out where the pressures are coming from for this person to have these repeated emergencies. Are they self-imposed or is this uninformed pressure coming from elsewhere in the organization?

If the person in question is self-creating, then you can work with them directly. If the churn is coming from other parts of the organization, then it may be time to bring everyone together to get alignment on priorities, communication, and how you all want to work together across functional areas. What you should NOT do is feed into this mania and continue to allow a culture of ASAP to fester.

And that is today's Wednesday Wisdom. Don't forget. If you have a question post it in the comments. Tune in next week for our next segment.  

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