On June 18th, I had two tests planned for the morning. By noon, neither had started. By end of day, neither had run.
The day wasn’t unusual. I work 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. in Bangkok, shifted late to overlap with Europe and still get a few hours with the US. The morning is supposed to be mine. But it’s also when the last messages from the US land, sent at the end of their day and waiting when I wake. Decisions already made, fires already lit. Every message carried an implicit “respond now,” and I responded. By the time I looked at my own list, the day belonged to other people’s timelines.
That pattern is what made me write down a statement I keep coming back to: “Most of what feels urgent has been made urgent by someone else’s timeline, expectation, or anxiety.” The test is direct: if left alone, does this actually need to be resolved today?
Working as a Service Delivery Lead across global time zones, the honest answer is more often no than I used to assume. Not always. Some of those messages are the first sign of a real problem, and catching them is the job. But plenty carry someone else’s anxiety more than any real deadline, and in the moment the two feel identical. A real deadline is a constraint I can plan around. Inherited anxiety is something I absorb without noticing, as if it were mine.
I noticed it clearly when I sat down in May to make a decision about self-care. The pace had been high for months. Heavy output across AI projects, a vault restructure, a publishing pipeline. All running simultaneously. Sleep deficit kept appearing in my notes. Photography practice, the one creative activity I’d deliberately kept free from deliverables, was getting squeezed out by output work. I’d written permissions for myself in my vault: work at a natural pace, disconnect, protect the creative practice. Every one of them was being overridden by whatever felt most urgent that day.
The decision I made was to rebuild the week around the things I’d been losing: sleep, training, recovery, photography, disconnection. All of them named, all of them given real time. But none of it holds unless the urgency filter comes first. Without separating what’s genuinely urgent from what just feels urgent because it’s close, every block I’d protected gets displaced by the next incoming fire.
I started running the filter. Before reacting to an incoming request: whose urgency is this? If it’s mine, I act. If it’s not, I try to move it to my own schedule instead of the sender’s. Some days that works. Many days it doesn’t, and I answer on their clock anyway. The filter doesn’t reliably win the time back. What it changes is the default: I’ve stopped treating every inherited request as mine to drop everything for.
The filter works best in the quiet window before the other regions are fully online. That’s when I can see the whole plate at once: what’s genuinely waiting, what only looks urgent, and the handful of things that are actually mine to move. I use that hour to set the order myself instead of letting the first message set it for me. On the mornings I protect it, the incoming work still lands, but it lands inside a plan I made instead of one the queue made for me.
It doesn’t always work. I still lose days to other people’s fires. The June 18th tests are proof: even when I could see the urgency wasn’t mine, I still defaulted to the incoming work. The pull is strong. What’s different isn’t that I always win the morning back. It’s that I notice the trade as I’m making it, instead of finding out at 11 p.m. that the day was never mine to begin with.
And not all of it was borrowed. Some of the pressure I blamed on other people’s timelines was mine: the AI projects, the vault rebuild, the publishing cadence I’d set for myself. Inherited urgency was the easier story. The hardest part of the filter, the part I trust least, is admitting when the urgency is one I manufactured and then resented.
I’m not sure this filter applies to roles where everything genuinely is time-sensitive, where the deadline is the product. But for knowledge work delivered across time zones, where most of the urgency is inherited rather than generated, learning to tell the difference is worth the effort.
