Stuck doing urgent stuff, being in reactionary mode, and feeling frazzled at the end of the day? Try this technique instead.

Ask for a timeline

When you get urgent requests—whether it pops up in your email, on text, in your DMs—instead of immediately replying that you’re on it, ask them what the deadline is first.

This is a critical and often missed step that can cause you to drop everything to focus on the request when you likely didn’t need to.

Most of the time, people assume phrases like “I need it right away” or “ASAP” means that you need to stop everything else you’re working on so you can get it out the door immediately. You might be surprised, but that’s usually not the case.

For example, a previous client of mine loved to over-deliver for his clients. But he soon realized that he’d been making assumptions about his client’s deadlines and it caused him and his team a lot of unnecessary stress because they were finishing way sooner than the client needed them to. When he started asking his clients what their specific deadlines were, he realized that he could easily over-deliver on their time frames and didn’t have to constantly push his team so hard.

Ways to ask for a timeline

A straightforward way to ask can sound like this:

  • When do you need this by?
  • What’s your deadline?

Make sure it’s clear to both you and the other person what “ASAP” or “right away” means.

If they’ve used ambiguous words like those, ask for a specific deadline. You can do this by giving them a menu of options:

  • You said, “Right away.” I want to make sure you get this when you need it. Is that in the next 10 minutes, or by noon, tomorrow, or…?
  • So that I can be sure to get this to you when you need it by, can you tell me what ASAP means for you? The next hour, tomorrow, this week…?

This helps them know that you’ve heard them, you understand it’s urgent, but that you also want more specifics. It also helps them feel like you are making sure their needs are met.

Once you know their timeline, you can adjust accordingly. It might turn out that you do need to drop everything to complete the project, but most times, you probably won’t need to.