Everything is urgent—until it isn’t. When every ticket is a fire, teams don’t move faster; they burn out. In this episode, Barbara Nicholas (CEO at Polly) borrows a lesson from search and rescue: urgency only matters when it actually changes outcomes. Most white-collar work isn’t life or death, but we’ve built cultures that pretend it is—and people are paying for it in cognitive overload and constant distraction.Barbara walks through how she operationalizes a triage system across her company—embedding shared language into tools like Slack, Notion, and Jira, and empowering teams to challenge urgency instead of blindly accepting it. From AI experimentation to customer demands and internal comms, this is a conversation about cutting through noise, making better calls under pressure, and remembering what actually matters.Related Links:Join the People Managing People CommunitySubscribe to the newsletter to get our latest articles and podcastsConnect with Barbara on LinkedInVisit PollySupport the show