Hey
You ever open Slack at 9:12am and find this message:
“Hey. Do you have a minute? This is kind of urgent.”
You haven’t even had coffee.
Your backlog is full.
And whatever this is, it’s about to hijack your whole day.
So what do you do?
If you’re like I was, you drop everything.
You dig in.
You become the hero, again.
And then your actual work gets pushed back.
Your priorities get fuzzy.
And the thing you said you'd deliver this week?
Now it’s next week. Again.
Here's the uncomfortable truth I had to learn:
Just because something feels urgent doesn’t mean it’s your emergency.
A lot of "fire drills" are really just someone else's poor planning. Or a misunderstanding. Or something that could be fixed next week… if someone just asked the right question.
The fix?
Treat it like triage.
Start by asking:
“What breaks if this doesn’t get solved today?”
Nine times out of ten, the answer tells you everything.
If it’s truly urgent, great — you act fast.
If it’s not, you reset expectations without dropping your entire day.
Inside the course, I walk through exactly how to do this.
We go deep into:
- How to triage urgent asks without saying “no”
- Escalation strategies that build trust, not blame
- How to protect your focus without looking unavailable
You don’t have to be the always-on engineer.
You just need a system for sorting real fires from fake ones.
👉 Here’s the early access link again if you’re ready to stop reacting and start leading.
Tomorrow, we’ll shift gears.
I’ll show you how to work with different types of stakeholders and why your usual approach might not work for all of them.
Talk soon,
Yordan
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