I wouldn’t call myself an easily distracted person, but when I’m at work, there are certain things that not only distract me but cause me to go into full panic mode. A new email pings through? Panic. A meeting gets put into your calendar? Panic. A Slack thread being particularly active that day? More panic. I could be deep in work mode and they still manage to bring me out of my laser-focused concentration, thinking that a particular email or meeting was the most urgent thing to happen to me that day. And in most instances, that’s simply not the case.

This internal urgency makes me feel as though I have to do everything that comes through immediately, otherwise I’ll fail. It puts me in a ‘stop-start’ mindset when it comes to my working day, which is a mindset that doesn’t fit with how I approach work. I’m a big fan of planning ahead and making sure I know what I’m doing with my time that day, colour-coding spreadsheets into sections and to-do lists. It’s the first thing I do when I log on every morning. But what this planning ahead doesn’t take into account is last-minute tasks, emails or meetings cropping up throughout the day. And to me, every single one of these is received as extremely urgent and has to be actioned at that very moment.

Even though deep down I know that’s not what’s expected, it’s how my mind reacts – an internal urgency that I can’t seem to switch off.

Last-minute tasks are, of course, a part of our working lives and not everything can be planned or predicted. But with my sense of internal urgency, it doesn’t particularly matter what the task or email is; it’s more the act of being alerted to something new coming in. I mean, the email could be a standard company-wide message that doesn’t require anything more than just reading it and I’d still break out into the beginnings of a cold sweat.

It’s something I’ve been attempting to unpack recently, figuring out why exactly I feel like I need to do everything as soon as possible. Especially as this internal urgency doesn’t always feed into other parts of my life. It only seems to come out in a work capacity. The WhatsApp notifications on my phone could be constantly pinging all day and it wouldn’t bother me as much as seeing one email come through. And I think it all comes down to time and how much of it I have during a work day.

There are only so many hours in a working day, and whether it’s self-imposed or managing your boss’s expectations, we try to squeeze as much work as we can into our days. For me, I try to get as much done so that the following day is that much easier, forgetting that tomorrow always brings its own to-do list. But the thing about squeezing as much out of your day as possible is that it leaves no time for life to get in the way. And life always gets in the way.

Leaving no breathing room in your working day means that you have no time for screen breaks, the inevitable brain fog that comes with the first days of your period or last-minute tasks that require some flexibility on your part. It’s an internal urgency that is constantly telling my mind: you have to do this right now or everything will go wrong. It feels like a less intense version of a fight-or-flight response but about emails and meetings. And I could be the most organised person in the world (I take my colour coding very seriously) but I still wouldn’t be able to account for or control every part of my job.

That’s not to say I’ll just be throwing caution to the wind now, but I take some comfort in knowing that this sense of urgency is very much internal and related to my own sense of time always running out rather than unrealistic expectations from managers. The emails may never stop, but I’m slowly starting to learn that I don’t need to read them that instant and they can indeed wait until tomorrow.

This article is part of Generation Tick Tock, a series exploring our complex relationship with time. You can read the full series here.

“Why do I feel like I have to do everything immediately?” On internal urgency