Burning daylight… or the candle at both ends?

If everything is urgent, nothing is strategic — because urgency alone isn’t a strategy, and speed alone isn’t progress.

Every leader I know (myself included) is trying to find that elusive pace: fast enough to stay relevant, steady enough not to drain out the team. And in a world where AI acceleration reshapes expectations weekly, the line between urgent and urgent-looking is thinner than ever.

If you’ve read my “debating physics in a room full of poets” piece, you know this tension well: half the room argues for possibility, the other half argues for limits, and everyone believes they’re the reasonable one. We talk about priorities and focus, yet somehow it still feels like we’re trying to sprint through peanut butter.

The real challenge?

Recognizing what’s genuinely urgent — versus what’s just performing urgency.

New tools drop faster than teams can adopt them. Your feed fills with “life-changing workflows,” and suddenly it seems like everyone is overtaking you from both sides. Healthy concern is productive because it keeps us from becoming the next Kodak, but when concern mutates into weekly panic, teams start chasing every shiny object as if the entire business depends on it.

My feed is full of shiny breakthroughs too — demos, workflows, tool drops, bold claims. I see the same things everyone else sees. But unlike the lucky few building on clean slates, some of us are dealing with reality.

The reality of legacy systems, legacy decisions, legacy architectures.
The reality of customers who rely on what already exists.
The reality of teams carrying a decade of context, not a week of experimentation.

The novelty is real. The acceleration is real. But so are the constraints we’re accountable for.

The problem with treating everything as urgent

I understand urgency. Truly. Every day we lose to confusion or indecision is a day we don’t get back. That part is real.

But I don’t understand the frenzy — the shortcuts, the scramble, the whiplash that comes from treating every idea as existential.

How that usually plays out in practice:

• Work gets faster (temporarily), but thinking gets worse.

  Reflection becomes a luxury no one feels permitted to take.

• Decisions shrink in scope but multiply in frequency.

  Less context, less alignment, more noise.

• We make the wrong call, realize it too late, and scramble to MacGyver¹ our way out.

  Hasty decision → hasty correction → another hasty decision.

• Knowledge consolidates in one or two people.

  When every parallel track needs to move “right now,” work distribution becomes a shell game: more people = more projects running simultaneously. Until one person becomes the bottleneck, the historian, and the firefighter.

• Teams work longer hours but deliver less meaningful output.

  Exhaustion masquerades as productivity. Burndown charts look busy, but the work feels hollow.

• Leaders feel “in control” because activity is high.

  Movement creates the illusion of progress: “We’re moving!” But are we? Or are we taking three steps forward and two back?

• Quality slips. Energy drains. Patience evaporates.

  And eventually, the team starts wondering whether leadership has lost the plot.

Urgency without clarity is not leadership. It’s adrenaline disguised as strategy.

And adrenaline is a powerful drug: it feels good in the moment, but it burns you out when you mistake it for momentum.

A quick detour: the origin of priority

The word priority comes from the Latin prior, meaning first. When it entered English in the 1400s, it was singular by design. You had a priority. One. The first thing.

It stayed that way for centuries.

Then we invented priorities — a linguistic loophole that let us pretend multiple things could be “first.” Once we stretched the word, we stretched our expectations too. Suddenly, “focus” meant juggling, and “strategic” meant overloaded.

And we started wondering why clarity kept slipping through our fingers. It didn’t slip away — we diluted it.

The illusion of “many first things”

Years ago, during quarterly planning, I was handed a spreadsheet with 40+ priorities for my team.

My first reaction: No.
My second reaction: Over my dead body.

We cut it down to 10, which was already heroic. After negotiation, we landed on 12. Twelve “first” things.

As I walked out, the VP of Product and Marketing said: “After you’re done with the first 12, you’ll do the rest, right?”

I nearly evaporated.

We still delivered 11.5. Not because the plan made sense, but because my team was good. Aligned. Protective of each other’s focus. Capable of stretching without snapping.

But the impossible list wasn’t the most corrosive part.

What came after was.

The hallway request — leadership’s quiet saboteur

Every leader knows the bypasser, the one who slips around the process to privately hand out a “harmless quick side quest”:

“Can you just look into this?”
“A tiny thing.”
“It won’t affect anything.”

No update to the plan (we confirmed like five minutes ago).
No context.
No visibility into the domino effect they’re creating.

This is how urgency turns into chaos.
This is how trust erodes.
This is how teams burn out.

Why is this a problem?

Because what do you expect this person (cornered, surprised, and eager to be helpful) will do? Say no? Of course not. They say yes, and they’re usually already conflicted before they even start the quest.

When I confront bypassers, I hear:

• “They could have said no.”

• “You’re complicating it.”

• “It’s not a big deal.”

But saying no to someone several levels above you isn’t safe. And the “small” requests almost never stay small.

Why does this happen?

Because going through the team feels too slow.
Because someone might ask annoying clarifying questions, and the requester will have to actually think about the potential outcomes and ripple effect.
Because the answers might not support the impulsive idea they want to push through.

This isn’t efficiency. It’s authority bias,² and I’ve seen the damage it does. It hurts the individual, the team, and the entire company. Guaranteed.

A “small side quest” taken in secret often derails the entire system.

Eventually, the person who took the task comes to you exhausted, apologetic, and misaligned, carrying the cost of someone else’s shortcut.

If you want something done through one of my people, bring it to me.

I’ll ask questions, yes — but I’ll also find the right person, the right timing, and the right tradeoffs. No drama. No stealth missions.

What protects a team?

A team strong enough to escalate rogue requests regardless of “don’t tell Mateja about this”.

A team confident enough to say: “These are the costs of this ‘small’ ask.”

But not every team has that strength yet. And power, even subtle power, can be intimidating. When that happens, professionals do what they must:

Disagree and commit — and document.

Document the ask, the risks, and the expected consequences. Then execute.

But let the requester own the twist that follows.

The 100x pressure our teams are carrying

AI hasn’t just raised expectations, it’s changed the tempo of the entire industry.

It’s no longer move fast.

It’s: Move fast because every week a new headline tells you you’re already behind.

But most teams aren’t building on clean slates. They’re juggling:

• systems 5–15 years old

• tools never meant to integrate

• decisions inherited from predecessors

• customers who expect today’s system to keep working

That takes real time, and not aspirational timelines.

No productivity hack or AI workflow magically rewires a decade of architectural choices.

Then there are the bold declarations making the rounds — the “we rebuilt everything in six weeks” or “we transformed the org in one quarter” stories. Inspiring? Absolutely. Replicable? Only sometimes.

Because before we compare ourselves to those teams, we have to ask a few grounding questions:

• How long have they been around?

  New companies move fast because they haven’t had time to accumulate architectural luggage or historical decisions.

• How much baggage are they carrying?

  A decade of customers, systems, and integrations changes the physics.

• What resources do they have?

  Platform teams, deep budgets, and the luxury to pause work we cannot.

• Or… are they simply doing the painful thing?

  The thing most orgs avoid?

  Saying no.

  To good ideas. To interesting ideas. To politically convenient ideas.

  Focus hurts — and some teams are just more willing to tolerate that pain.

Which leaves us with a harder, more honest question:

What have we said no to lately?

The opposite extreme: pretending it’s still 2019

On the other side are leaders who behave as if nothing has changed.

They’re using the new tools, sure.

But they’re still operating with an old mental model, one built for a slower decade — a decade where you did have time to gather everyone, align endlessly, and polish decisions like they were museum pieces.

These leaders act as if we still have all the time in the world:

• Every detail must be reviewed.

• Every stakeholder must weigh in.

• Approvals for trivial steps

• Every meeting needs a pre-meeting.

It’s like watching a tsunami roll in and saying:

“Let’s first have a meeting next week.”

This rarely comes from laziness. It comes from fear of being wrong, fear of breaking something, fear of missing the perfect option.

But fear dressed as diligence still freezes the system.

Some leaders insist on personally approving everything under the banner of “quality,” even as the world accelerates beyond them.

They’re chasing perfection in a world that now rewards adaptation far more.

Real leadership lives between these extremes

Most of us operate in the messy, necessary middle — not frantic, not frozen. We’re in the messy middle, where real leadership actually lives.

Here’s the reality: information has to travel fast.

Teams need visibility to make the right micro-decisions. Decision-makers need input early enough to adjust course. Making micro-decisions is part of empowerment.

Transparency doesn’t mean consensus on the big decisions. It means people know what’s happening while it still matters.

So… Our job is to facilitate change at a sustainable pace — to know when to accelerate and when to pause.

Leaders who avoid this work fall into two patterns:

• secrecy and side quests

• over-alignment and paralysis

Neither serves the team.

A good leader has to understand when to push and when to pull, and operate by principles that keep teams aligned and sane.

This is where the fundamentals of Extreme Ownership³ fit beautifully:

• Cover and Move — we win as a team, not as lone heroes.

• Keep It Simple, Clear, and Concise — if people can’t understand it, they can’t execute it.

• Prioritize and Execute — one real priority at a time.

• Decentralized Command — push decisions to the people closest to the work, not above-the-rules leaders or hallway missions.

This isn’t theory. It’s the operating system that lets teams move fast and stay stable, without collapsing into either extreme.

Fartlek: the pace leadership actually requires

So what’s the “right” pace?

Neither sprint nor crawl. Leadership is fartlek.

Fartlek, a Swedish term meaning “speed play,” is a training method that involves continuously running by alternating between fast bursts and slower, recovery jogs. Unlike structured interval training, fartlek is flexible and can be self-directed based on feel, landmarks, or a timer, and it improves both speed and endurance.⁴

Some moments demand acceleration. Some moments require a full stop and a recalibration. Most moments live somewhere in between.

We need a way of moving that acknowledges both the urgency of change and the reality of teams, systems, and humans.

It’s the closest thing we have to interval training for organizations:

• accelerate when the path opens

• slow when context or risk demand it

• recover just long enough to think clearly

• re-accelerate with intention, not panic

Because our world is too fast for slow-walking every decision… and too complex for sprinting through everything without thinking.

Fartlek is the middle path: intentional pace-shifting.

It demands judgment, awareness, and maturity, but it’s the only way to move fast without breaking the people making the movement possible.

What works? Focus, paired with the right pace.

Real focus is expensive.
It costs you possibilities.
It costs you optionality.
It costs you distractions.
It costs you the dopamine hit of saying yes to everything interesting.

It is also what keeps the team sane when “priority” balloons from one to one hundred before lunch.

But here’s the thing: focus alone is not enough.

Fartlek gives you the pace. Focus gives you the direction.
One without the other is pointless.

If you shift speeds without a clear priority, you’re just changing tempo while running in circles. And if you have a clear priority but keep the same pace for everything, you’ll burn out long before you get there.

Leaders need both: the ability to adjust pace and the discipline to protect what matters.

So when urgency is high and the pace feels messy, start with the basics:

1. What’s the real priority? If everything matters, nothing matters.

2. What must move now versus later?

3. Who needs context to succeed?

4. What pace does this moment actually require?

This is leadership in practice: adjusting speed with intention while protecting what matters.

The one takeaway

We’re all burning daylight. That part is unavoidable.

The real question is whether we’re burning daylight on what actually moves us forward… or burning the candle at both ends because the world looks like it’s sprinting and we’re afraid to fall behind.

Real urgency sharpens. False urgency exhausts.

Leaders who can tell the difference, who pair adaptive pace with disciplined focus, are the ones who build teams that stay healthy, aligned, and truly productive.

We can’t guarantee success, especially not now.

But we can avoid the failures we already recognize — the ones that always begin the same way:

Urgency with no focus.

1. More about MacGyvering your way out of problems: https://betweencodeandculture.substack.com/i/179004106/the-macgyver-school-of-leadership

2. Authority bias: subordinates may comply simply because a request comes from someone with power. Some leaders consciously or unconsciously exploit this bias.

3. Extreme ownership strategy and principles: https://echelonfront.com/what-are-extreme-ownership-leadership-strategies/

4. What is fartlek: https://www.underarmour.com/en-us/t/playbooks/running/fartlek-run/