It's 4:45 in the afternoon, and you get an email marked urgent. You open it, dreading what it could be. It's from your boss to the entire office. A lot of people have already left and won't see it, so can it really be that urgent? You open it, and it says there is a staff meeting tomorrow at nine o'clock. This is quite an unusual pattern, and you know that if you hadn't read the email, you would have been in big trouble the next day. How do we handle situations like this? What do we do when our bosses or our spouses create urgency when there is really none? That's what I'm going to talk about today, and I'll be back with the answer right after this.

One of the most stressful parts of modern life is the constant sense of urgency. Some of it is real, and some of it is not. And what we must do is pause before reacting and figure out if it's going to matter tomorrow or not.