“Fast-paced, Dynamic Environments”: distinguishing the noise from the signal.
If you have to put out serious fires every day, if your lab is always on “deadline mode” or or “all hands on deck” mode, include every emergency in your task list for the week. If your boss needs this job done now and then the next job done now, write that down. If every day you end up having a 2 hour meeting with your advisor to micromanage or discuss your performance (not including scientific discussions here), make note of it. If you have to spend time every day cleaning up other people’s actions thinking on your feet, document it.
The goal of this exercise is to understand that if everything is an emergency, there is something else going on. Urgency is supposed to be an emergency state where you draw on reserves to make things work, and then return to a more calm and proactive baseline. Anything different, and what you have is a false urgency environment. It is important for you to understand this even if you cannot do much about it. You will need to create boundaries over your inner peace, knowing that just because something looks like an emergency, it is not.
Some environments are very good at creating false urgency, where everything is a priority. If you stop for a moment, you are seen as sluggish. When you live in a false urgency environment it is very easy to get swept by the climate of anxiety and buzz.
The reason I write about false urgency is:
a) our job involves managing our time, and managing other people.
b) some bosses use false emergency to feel productive, and some coworkers use it to look productive in front of their bosses.
c) false urgency creates a lot of adrenaline and can lead to burnout.
If you live in a false urgency environment, the first thing to do is acknowledge that fact. This is when documenting is useful, to show you how much of your day you spend in emergency mode. The second thing to do is give yourself more energy in the form of short, small calming and proactive tasks (really tiny tasks, like making a list of your staining slides, organizing one rack of samples, 5 minutes of literature search with a timer, etc.). This will be really helpful to give you mental space away from the emergency (and cuts down on time spent in self-recrimination, or being the object of recrimination by others). In time, this mental space helps you figure out how best to respond to every claim of an emergency (including trading tasks with someone else, or forming partnerships). This does not mean you will not follow orders or execute, but the change in your thinking about the event as an emergency vs non emergency makes a big difference in how much energy and stress you will devote to an event, and why.