Your team learns what “urgent” means from you. Call everything urgent and nothing will be.

Words wear out with overuse. If every task arrives marked as the most important thing, people lose the ability to tell which one genuinely cannot wait, and they quietly start setting their own order without telling you. Then when something really is pressing you have no way left to say so. Saving the word is what keeps it working.

Look at the last few things you called urgent and count how many were. Rank your next three requests out loud, including which one can slip. Use the strong word once this week at most.