Manufactured Urgency Is Not the Same as Discipline
When creating pressure helps you move — and when it starts building toward burnout.
Last week I talked about burnout and how burnout and chronic stress, in general, impact the way we operate, creating a vicious circle.
Also last week, I came across another creator’s post about how there is no need to hit rock bottom to create the changes you want to see. Very inspiring. The post was addressed to engineers.
And it’s true: you shouldn’t need to hit rock bottom to take action. That is universal and applies to every domain.
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What this creator suggested — and what he mentioned he had seen in successful engineers — was the idea of manufacturing urgency. The concept seemed interesting to me because, as an engineer who has worked in big tech, the idea of urgency is ubiquitous.
In a nutshell, my understanding is that manufacturing urgency means setting constraints yourself that are a subset of the constraints that actually surround what you need to do — for instance, setting a deadline before an actual deadline occurs.
Now, in many cases, there won’t be a deadline — for instance, if you are building a new product that nobody knows about.
The idea itself is very enticing. If you manufacture urgency, you get things done faster, you don’t wait for real consequences, and life gets better.
A question that came to mind is: how related is the idea of urgency to the idea of stress?
How sustainable is it to continuously manufacture urgency across different parts of your life without burning out in the process?
That’s what I want to navigate today.
Does urgency impact stress?
For a big part of my life, the idea of urgency was inherently tied to the idea of being under stress. If something is urgent, you just drop everything and address it. The clock is ticking, so you need to get it done. Yesterday.
Maybe this is an idea I created in my head when I was little, when I was at school. I remember everything seemed to be urgent: tests, homework. I needed to perform because I wanted to keep being the smart kid, as if my identity were merely tied to results.
When I went to university, that idea changed a bit. I noticed that even when I treated everything with urgency, sometimes others would get better scores than I did, and that effort, while useful, wasn’t necessarily equal to great grades. Gradually, not everything became urgent. Some things were just important, and with that, my levels of stress progressively went down.
I guess I didn’t really pay much attention to the idea of urgency itself, only to the idea of stress stemming from it.
Reading about manufactured urgency made me wonder: are these two concepts, stress and urgency, tightly coupled?
Urgency is tightly coupled to stress. Now, this is normal. Stress is a natural response when a threat is imminent. Animals, us included, have historically used stress as a way to protect ourselves. It’s an evolutionary mechanism.
The difference today is that, for animals, the threat response happens in response to actual physical threats — for instance, having to run from a predator. In our case, we can also perceive a situation as an imminent threat, and in this type of situations our brain doesn’t distinguish what is real from what is not.
And that’s a problem.
Not only that, but for animals, stress stops after the threat has gone away. We have gotten used to keeping our alarm on. The stress, the threat, never really leaves our heads. This eventually builds up and can become chronic if untreated.
That represents an additional problem, making things even worse.
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Then, how sustainable is the idea of manufactured urgency?
Let’s start with the spoiler: it’s not sustainable.
Think about this. We know that urgency is coupled to stress, and we now know that, unlike other animals, we keep our stress around. That can become chronic, leading to burnout. I don’t know if you remember what happens to us when we enter the burnout cycle, but I’ll repeat it here: once you get into the burnout cycle, it’s hard — yet not impossible — to get out. Periods of sustained stress lead to glutamate buildup, and buildup that is not cleared can lead to cognitive impairment.
So, what do you think happens when we create urgency out of thin air?
Manufactured urgency can lead to burnout, mainly because you set a deliberately made-up deadline that has no natural ending. If you don’t have an alarm to tell you when to stop, then damage is around the corner. This is exactly what leads to chronic stress: the threat is still there; it never leaves.
The problem, then, is not setting self-imposed deadlines. A bounded deadline, attached to a real constraint and separated from other deadlines, can actually be useful. The problem is when we make the deadline itself into a threat and then keep doing that across every area of our lives, without leaving space to return to our baseline.
Now, not all is lost. The truth is that manufactured urgency just like that is not sustainable.
Before I continue on this line, though, I will do a little branching, so please bear with me.
If we want to understand why manufactured urgency can become unsustainable, we need to look at what is driving us when we use it. This is where self-determination theory helps.
Have you heard of self-determination theory?
Self-determination theory (SDT) is a psychological framework that proposes that we, as humans, are intrinsically motivated and naturally driven to grow, thrive, and feel fulfilled. This motivation is sustained by three psychological needs:
Autonomy — The need to be your own boss and act because of your own choice rather than external coercion.
Competence — The need to improve: to build skills, develop abilities, master tasks, and become effective.
Relatedness — The need to experience a sense of belonging and social safety. We are gregarious beings.
This theory explains that why we do things matters more than how hard we try. We do things driven by either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation. Simply put: if you do something because you want to do it, then it’s intrinsic. If you are doing it for a reason other than wanting to do it — like external rewards or avoiding threats (sound familiar?) — then it’s extrinsic.
Furthermore, SDT digs deeper and groups motivation into two categories:
Controlled — Someone else’s rewards or punishments (extrinsic — external motivation); a self-imposed threat such as guilt, shame, or decreased self-worth (e.g., “I’m a failure”; extrinsic — introjected motivation).
Autonomous — You genuinely value the outcome, even though you don’t like the task (extrinsic — identified motivation); the values associated with the outcome fit who you are and make sense to you (extrinsic — integrated motivation); or you simply find it meaningful (intrinsic motivation).
The problem with manufactured urgency as it is usually practiced is that we disguise controlled motivation (do it or else) as autonomous motivation (I don’t want to do it, but I want the outcome). In other words, manufactured urgency feels autonomous, but it’s not.
If you go back to the story I shared, this disguise is precisely the trap:
I needed to perform because I wanted to keep being the smart kid, as if my identity were merely tied to results.
I manufactured urgency not because I valued the outcome itself, although I thought I did, but because something else was at stake: my identity. And this is precisely what we usually fall prey to. As we said, manufactured urgency can make controlled motivation feel autonomous. You think you are acting because you want the outcome, but deep down, you are just trying to avoid guilt, shame, failure, or a threat to your identity.
So how do we make manufactured urgency sustainable?
Let’s go back to the idea in the introduction.
In a nutshell, the idea of manufacturing urgency is to set constraints yourself that are a subset of the constraints that actually surround what you need to do.
In an isolated environment, where manufactured urgency happens sporadically and real deadlines are set, your brain gets a signal to stop. Not necessarily at the made-up deadline, but at the hard, final one. After that, regardless of the result, the threat either materialized or it didn’t. There is an end to it: you either completed the project, or you received a negative evaluation, etc. The threat is over. Period. No more stress. You get to rest; your brain gets the chance to return to baseline.
In this scenario, the idea of self-determination takes the backseat because, in reality, the reason why you are doing it doesn’t have as much weight if you know that there is a time limit. You just do the thing because you need to do it, or because you want to do it. Whatever.
Real life is different, though. We have many things going on in our lives. We might be managing multiple projects at work, going through stuff at home, or dealing with things we need to attend to that we don’t really want to do — like going to the gym or eating better. All of them have some degree of importance, but only we know for sure what that is. Add to this the fact that we won’t always have real deadlines to meet, like “just wanting to get in shape” or “writing the book I’ve always wanted to write.”
And here is where the danger lies. When I said manufactured urgency is not sustainable, I spoke in a generalized sense — because it’s the most common way we use it. When we have deadlines everywhere and deliberately manufacture more deadlines, usually with manufactured threats (e.g., “If I don’t go to the gym three times this week, I’ll just eat salads next week”), then, for our brains, there is virtually no end to the stress. The price we pay for that is what the literature calls allostatic load.
So what do we do about it?
We work on the conditions we have control over: motivation and time.
Let’s say you have a task that is naturally tied to controlled motivation — for instance, a competition: you must complete a certain goal within a certain time in order to win.
This milestone will compete with other priorities in your life, so you have two things you can do that are not mutually exclusive:
Reframe the motivation: Instead of thinking, What will I lose if I don’t complete it?, think, Why do I want this prize? How would my life change if I win?
Set a deadline that doesn’t overlap with many other milestones: The more things you have going on, the more context-switching you do. This hinders your performance on each task and increases the stress of completing them on time. You need to practice your prioritization skills and organize yourself based on your priorities. Not everything is urgent.
Prioritizing and leaving space between finishing one milestone and starting something new gives your brain the rest it needs to avoid burnout.
So, continuing with the competition example, let’s be more specific. Let’s say you are about to compete in a triathlon, and you also have other things you need to do:
The competition is in two months, and you are not nearly ready to compete.
You want to buy a new bicycle before the competition. You’ve been talking about it for a while, and now you have two months.
You have a project at work that is due around the same time you will take time off for the competition.
You suspect you’ll be part of your employer’s next round of layoffs, which was announced to happen in two weeks, so you want to try to find something fast.
How do we manufacture urgency in a way that doesn’t backfire?
Too many things are happening here, and this is just a small representation of reality. Reality is often much more gruesome.
The first thing we should do in each case is assess:
How important is this to me?
There are different ways to assess this, but they all respond to the same underlying question: What is my motivation?What are the consequences if I let go of or deprioritize one of these priorities?
For instance, if there is a layoff and you decide to look for another job, but perhaps not with the same cadence because you don’t really have much time, how prepared are you to face this scenario? If you decide not to compete and focus on finding something, what is the opportunity cost of doing this?How related are these scenarios?
For instance, if you decide not to compete, then suddenly buying the bicycle isn’t a priority anymore. You will be able to focus on the project, which will probably bring better results and maybe protect you from the next round of layoffs, although that’s not guaranteed.What deadlines can coexist without risking my mental health?
If different activities belong to the same context and each of them needs a deadline, then that’s easier to manage because they are part of the same project. The situation gets muddy when you start managing overlapping deadlines from different contexts.
Once you assess the situation and decide, you can enforce the deadlines. For this, motivation is key: focus on how what you need to do aligns with what you want to do, rather than on what you would lose if you don’t do it. The final deadline will arrive either way, and the real consequences will show up regardless, so you might as well reframe the motivation in a way that aligns with your purpose.
There will be times when the real deadlines overlap or are back-to-back. This is not always the case, so when it happens, know that there will eventually be a period you should use to return to your baseline. Just make sure that the urgency you create for yourself always leaves a gap so recovery remains sustainable.
But what happens if I don’t meet the deadline I imposed on myself?
The plain answer is nothing happens. If you have a real deadline as a constraint, then the real deadline will take care of it. Now, this is where motivation matters. As we observed, reframing motivation helps you keep the sense of urgency and helps you complete your goals before your self-imposed deadline. The cool thing is that even if you don’t meet the deadline you set for yourself, you are still aligned with what you are doing. You just have to make sure that you are still on track for the real deadline.
The problem comes when there are no real deadlines. What do we do then?
In this case, a strategy we can follow is to approach people we trust and share our deadline with them, so they can hold us accountable. At this point, we are relying on an external structure to complete the task, but with the right framing, it can still support autonomous motivation. Once you establish the deadline out loud, it becomes a commitment — a promise that needs to be fulfilled. If you care about keeping your word, then it is aligned with what you want to do.
In our next paid companion, we will practice katas that will help us develop manufactured urgency in a sustainable way.
Until then, make sure that when you impose deadlines on yourself, you do it for a reason you truly deem valid, and avoid overlaps with other deadlines that might not be related.
Have a wonderful week!
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