Momentum Fever
I have had a few conversations this past week that all circled the same drain.
The “ASAP” drain.
Not the occasional real emergency. I mean the weekly pattern where everything shows up wearing an ASAP hoodie, breathing heavily, acting like the company will explode if this one banner, deck tweak, landing page section, or “quick idea” is not shipped by end of day.
And the wild part is how often leadership reads the symptoms backwards.
They see slower output, missed expectations, messy quality, burnout, and then they conclude: “People problem.”
More hiring.
More pressure.
More standups.
More “just push through.”
But when ASAP becomes a default, it is rarely a people problem.
It is usually a clarity problem.
The disease: momentum fever
I call it momentum fever.
It is when a team confuses motion with progress. Everyone is doing things. Everyone is busy. Everyone is “moving fast”.
But nobody can tell you, clearly, what direction you are actually moving in, what matters most this week, and what gets dropped when something new enters the room.
Momentum fever feels productive because there is activity. It looks like performance because tasks are being closed. It sounds like leadership because there is urgency.
In reality, it is often just panic with better branding.
ASAP culture is a management leak
Here’s an unpopular opinion: when “ASAP” becomes a weekly trend, it is not a sign your team is incompetent.
It is a sign your system is leaking.
Because urgency does not magically appear at the bottom of the org chart. It is produced upstream, by unclear priorities, fuzzy decision rights, and last-minute changes being treated as normal.
If every deliverable is automatically “ASAP”, you do not have a speed problem.
You have a focus problem.
And focus is not a motivation issue. It is design. It is leadership. It is management.
The hidden accelerant: bureaucracy and credit-chasing
Now let’s add the spice, because this is where it gets ugly.
ASAP gets supercharged when bureaucracy enters the chat.
Not healthy process. Not governance that protects quality.
I mean the kind of bureaucracy that exists mainly so someone can say, “This went through me.”
The kind where work is not blocked by difficulty, but by permission.
Three approvals for a typo fix.
Four stakeholders for a landing page headline.
A meeting to schedule the meeting where we decide who gets to decide.
And if you really want to set the building on fire, add career-driven leadership.
The kind of leader who does not measure success by outcomes, but by visibility.
They do not want the work to be right.
They want the work to be theirs.
So they insert themselves into everything:
- “Just run it by me quickly.”
- “Let’s align on this.”
- “I want to be across it.”
Translation: I need to be seen.
That is how you get a company where:
- Decision-making is slow
- Accountability is fuzzy
- Everyone is busy
- Nothing ships
Because the bottleneck is not talent.
It is ego.
And once ego becomes a workflow, output becomes collateral damage.
Busy is not productive (and it never was)
It is not hard to stay busy.
If you give a smart person a Slack channel, a backlog, a few stakeholders, and no guardrails, they will stay busy forever.
Busy is easy. Busy is reactive. Busy is “sure, I can do that” energy.
Productive is different.
Productive means you can explain, in one or two sentences:
- What matters this week
- Why it matters
- What does not matter (yet)
- What gets sacrificed when the scope expands
That is not a talent thing.
That is clarity.
Competency plus clarity equals results
This is the simplest equation I keep coming back to:
Competency (people) + Clarity (company) = Results
Most leaders obsess over competency because it is tangible. You can hire it, fire it, rate it, promote it.
Clarity is harder. It requires saying no. It requires tradeoffs. It requires disappointing someone today so you can win tomorrow.
So what happens?
Leadership under-invests in clarity and over-demands outcomes.
Then they fund the team like a production line and expect strategic partner output.
The “strategic partner” lie
Teams are expected to deliver agency-level creativity and strategic thinking at always-on speed, but they are resourced and operated like a production department.
That creates a losing game:
- You cannot build quality if every brief arrives as an emergency.
- You cannot retain great people if the only way to cope is to work late, apologise often, and absorb pressure.
- You cannot be strategic when you are permanently in turnaround mode.
Then the story gets flipped.
Stakeholders complain the team is slow.
Leadership says the team is not efficient enough.
Turnover rises.
And the conclusion becomes: “In-house doesn’t work.”
No.
Under-invested, unclear, constantly interrupted teams do not work.
A real-world example: Nike cutting through the layers
This is why I love the Nike example, because it shows what “treating the cause” looks like at scale.
Nike was not “going under”, but it absolutely hit a rough patch with slowing momentum and pressure to course-correct, including large layoffs in 2024 aimed at “reigniting growth.”
Then came the bigger signal: leadership change.
Nike replaced CEO John Donahoe with long-time Nike veteran Elliott Hill (effective October 2024).
And what did Hill start doing as part of the turnaround?
He started cutting through the layers.
Nike’s own leadership reshuffles under the “Win Now” turnaround were explicitly framed as removing management layers, reducing bureaucracy, and speeding up execution. In late 2025, for example, Nike eliminated roles at the top and reorganised leadership responsibilities specifically to simplify decision-making and move faster.
That is the point.
When output slows, you can either:
- Blame the people and crank urgency
- Or remove the friction that is choking delivery
Nike picked option two.
What “ASAP” usually means
In my experience, “ASAP” is often code for one of these:
- We did not plan
- We changed our minds late
- We never aligned on priority
- We do not have decision rights
- We let the loudest stakeholder set the roadmap
- We are mistaking pressure for progress
ASAP is rarely a true timeline. It is usually a symptom of missing structure.
So how do you treat the cause, not the symptom?
The anti-ASAP playbook
Here are a few practical workarounds that actually reduce urgency over time.
1. Define what urgent means (for real)
Most teams do not have an urgency definition. They have an urgency vibe.
Create a simple rule:
Urgent means one of the following:
- Revenue is directly blocked
- A launch date is at risk within 48 hours
- A customer impact incident is live
- A legal or compliance deadline exists
Everything else is important, not urgent.
If someone says “ASAP”, ask: “Which category is this?”
Not aggressively. Just clinically.
2. Build a single intake lane
Urgency thrives in chaos.
If requests can come from anywhere (DMs, calls, Slack pings, WhatsApps), then you will always feel behind, because you are not managing work, you are chasing it.
One lane. One form. One board.
If it is not in the lane, it is not real.
3. Add the missing field: “What gets deprioritised?”
This is the strongest urgency killer I know.
When a new request arrives, ask one question:
“Cool. What should we drop to make space?”
If the requester cannot answer, they do not actually need it ASAP. They just want it soon and they are outsourcing stress.
Tradeoffs turn “ASAP” into reality.
4. Introduce default timelines
People default to urgency when there is no baseline.
Create standard turnaround expectations:
- Small edits: 24 to 48 hours
- Medium deliverables: 3 to 5 days
- Large deliverables: 1 to 3 weeks
Then “urgent” becomes an exception that has to be justified, not a default that has to be survived.
5. Protect deep work like it is a deliverable
If your calendar is constantly shredded by context switching, output will degrade, even with great people.
Block maker time.
Batch feedback cycles.
Limit live approvals.
You cannot create quality in fragments.
6. Separate speed from direction
This is the heart of momentum fever.
Picking and sticking to a direction is just as crucial as how fast you are moving.
A team running in the wrong direction at full speed is not high performance.
It is expensive cardio.
The founder-level reality check
If you are a founder, or leading a team, and you feel like everything is urgent, ask yourself:
- Do we have a clear weekly priority?
- Do people know what “good” looks like?
- Do we have decision rights, or are we running on opinions?
- Are we rewarding last-minute changes?
- Are we confusing responsiveness with effectiveness?
- Are we confusing “alignment” meetings with actual leadership?
Because if the system rewards chaos, you will keep getting chaos, no matter how talented your people are.
The closing thought
In-house teams do not need motivational speeches.
They need clarity, investment, and protection from chaos.
And if your team is “failing”, ask one question first:
Have we built the conditions for them to succeed, or have we built a pressure cooker and called it a strategy?
