An average inbox on the average day ...
Everything’s been flagged urgent by someone, somewhere, for some reason that felt real when they hit send.
At some point, all the flags and alarms become white noise.
People start making their own calls about what matters—based on who is asking, what feels visible, what seems most immediate.
I learned this the hard way when I was a leader at Microsoft.
Because I was always on. Nights, weekends—even when I was sick. Red bangs on half my emails. Replies expected the same day, sometimes in the same hour.
I wasn’t thinking about any of it as signal. It was just the pace I was moving at.
What I didn’t see: My team had found their own way to re-sort: their take on which of my “urgents” were actually urgent, which ones could wait, and which ones I’d forget I sent by morning.
They were running their own triage system underneath mine.
They weren’t wrong to triage. They were doing their best with what I gave them.
The risk, of course—is that they were working with partial information.
I say X. They triage Y. We lose alignment but don’t see it happen.
We’re all moving so fast that there’s a high probability your team is triaging anyway.
What can you do to stay aligned?