Good policy.
ASAP, to me, is indeed a plea for me to drop everything and do this N.O.W. and it really pisses me off.
Lack of good judgment and time management on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
I run a creative services department and I will not accept a brief that has asap on it. I return it to the person who sent the brief along with my leadtimes for each kind of artwork they require - eg. a simple mock a day, complicated mocks might require 2 days and get them to resubmit with appropriate timing.
Or if it’s really really really urgent, i get them to negotiate with the person’s whose brief i have to stop production on and both agree to changing timelines. it might sounds pedantic, but I’m a department of 3 servicing over 50 very demanding people and stringent process is the only way to keep everyone happy.
At my work, if people ask for something to be done ASAP, 9 times out of 10 they mean exactly “I want you to drop everything and work on this for me, because it’s inconveniencing me.” Nevermind that obviously many others are being inconvenienced by problems, or that you say you’ve had this problem all day but wait until 4.30 pm to call and THEN you want it done immediately…
And if it’s not solved in an hour (and we’re talking mundane crap like “I have a new employee that will be starting at this location in two weeks, can they get set up?”, not things like “the network is down” or “no one can get into this essential program”), they’ll call and ask for a status update and get pissy that it’s not done now.
I express the same sentiment in a somewhat more concise form:
“Your lack of planning does not make this my crisis.”
I have actually used this to fairly good effect during my career.
That’s when you say “well, currently ASAP is a week from next Tuesday”.
A more humble and modest-looking alternative is “a.s.a.p.” Look at all those demure little lowercase letters gently purring their request instead of screaming it! (And the periods are so a careless reader won’t mistake it for an actual word.)
I like this idea a lot, and I know exactly who I’m going to use this on.
Do you ever get this?
End user: Is the [insert servername/application/Internet here] down?
Me: Yes, we’re trying to find out now what’s going on.
End user: Any idea when it will be back up?
In my head I want to say: Let me just glance into future to give you a precise answer.
In reality I say: We’ll have it back As Soon As Possible
So, upon reflection, perhaps I deserve to pitted as well.
Just curious: Since “A.S.A.P.” seems to mean “drop everything and do this right away” to people, what does “immediately” mean? Would “immediately” have no more urgency than “A.S.A.P.”?
Hear, hear!
The OP is right on. I work inside the DC Beltway about half of my working week, and there is an entire ecosystem that feeds on this “A sap” stuff… some kind of tube-mouthed family of sucking insects, I guess. I call it Fire Drills or Bring Me a Rock, but there are a million variations. I’ve already hidden the ! field on my e-mail client. At my old office, where we had flexible UNIX-based mail tools, it was possible to do all sorts of cool things based on that flag – I ended up filing it in a folder called “SHIT HOT”. At the end of every work day, items in the “SHIT HOT” folder got the urgent flag stripped away and then put back in the inbox. Unfortunately my current tool is not as flexible, so I have to settle for deleting them by hand. I have missed one important e-mail in the last year from this protocol… and saved myself about two hours of reading through someone’s hypercaffeinated shorthand to decipher a message that (whoops!) was an auto-prioritized reply-all to a list that they knew their intended recipient was on. It was so important that they spammed it to fifty people rather than look up the one person’s name. Deleted! BOOM! Bye!
The problem, of course, is that to the near-sighted self-important spazzes who freak out whenever Starbuck’s forgets to put their boss’s coffee in a doubled cup (NOT a cup-with-brown-insulator-sleeve!), a simple hint from someone on high gets magnified into direct orders for products. By interpreting the boss’s every thought as though it were the word of a god, they magnify their own importance within the hierarchy. Sure, they’re lickspittles, but what AMAZING spittle it is! The boss says something like “Steve, that’s a solid way to present that data. Nice work.” The e-mail goes out from the CrackBerry seven-and-a-half seconds later:
After I spent six months working with a team of sycophantic colon-tonguing chihuahuas who were certain that there was No Bigger Dog than their boss, I became numbed to this state of perpetual panic, and I imagine that’s where the OP is right about now.
Succintly now, once more with feeling. We’ll do this logically. The OP’s job consists of using his or her judgment to decide what is and is not a priority; it’s not unreasonable for the OP to consider the person issuing a task as a factor. A person who issues all tasks at some imaginary DEFCON minus-three priority level clearly has no sense of scale… and their task should be assumed to be almost entirely without merit, lest the OP miss a task with a more subtle (but more meritorious) priority.
So, three cheers to the OP. Like they said when I was in ROTC: anyone who yells “I’m in charge here!” isn’t. If someone has to tell you it’s important, it probably isn’t. Tell you what, OP: I’ll take over for you. Head down to the bait store, find a tub of fat juicy worms, and get down to a bridge and do some fishing to clear your mind.
Get on it ASAP.
I love this. Mind if I steal it sometime? 
About five, I think.
When I get an email regarding my Web site, and it asks me to “kindly do the needful and oblige at the earlist”, it’s kindly deleted very much please. The “you’re going to do this right away, chop chop!” tone of email from the subcontinent is just condescending to my ears.
My father used to hold the following priorities, both for his own work and others:
- whenever you can, but let me know when should I remind you of it.
- as soon as you can, without dropping routine stuff.
- now.
- yesterday.
I prefer to tell people when I expect to have things. If I say “it should be ready by Friday”, it means “you’ll have it Friday before leaving work or sooner;” if you want it within half an hour you have to discuss it with the rest of my customers.
If I ask someone to do something by a certain time/date I explain why and ask them to let me know if it won’t be by that time so I can work with the actual expected time.
If someone comes saying “you have to do this NOW!”… honey, there better be someone bleedin’, 'cos otherwise it’s first come first serve. People who yell at me go to the back of the list; people who expect me to read their minds or who insist in calling me by phone/having me call rather than using that wonderful tool, the written word, go behind the yellers.
Wonder if I could get me a doctor’s certificate saying I’m deaf. You have to bloody use bloody email and send the bloody attachments, no, I’m not spending two hours on the bloody phone with you and then coming over with my laptop so we can play “find the bunny” with the IR antennas.
Do you think that last paragraph was bloody enough? Excuse me: the bloody IR antennas.
To me, immediately is more urgent than ASAP.
It’s great to see that not everyone here means “NOW!” when they say “ASAP”, but a lot of folks do.
I used to have a problem with a gal at the last place I worked. She was constantly "ASAP"ing us, especially on days when the managers weren’t around. She was a leasing consultant (property management) and I was maintenance. We were at the same level of job, just doing very different things.
The one I remember most was a nice, sunny Saturday, and I was hauling dumpsters to the compactor. See, when you’re doing this, it really takes priority over anything else 'til you’re done, unless something is flooding or on fire. The dumpsters are dangerous to have loose and unattended, and they block traffic like nobody’s business. So Leasing Consultant (LC) calls me on the radio:
LC: Bring up the leasing cart, ASAP (a golf cart, and her feet apparently don’t work. No “Please”?)
Me: Um, ok I’m in the middle of doing trash. I’ll bring it up as soon as I’m done.
LC: Assistant Manager wants it up here NOW!
Turns out the Asst. Manager didn’t want anything, and wasn’t even in the office yet, and there wasn’t any reason at all that it was even needed right then. That was her attitude every time she wanted something from us, especially Saturdays, when she knew damn well maintenance was short-staffed. Thankfully she lightened up after she got pregnant. The two of us ended up being sort-of friends before I left.
I’ve started to completely ignore our resident’s pleas of “emergency!” “ASAP!” “Urgent! Urgent!”. They can’t seem to remember that they truly are not the only people that live at our property, and a sink draining slowly really isn’t the end of the world. If I could only get them to accurately explain what their problem is so I can prioritize properly, we’d all be much happier.
Really, a slow leak under your kitchen sink is much different than water spraying everywhere under your bathroom sink, and if water is spraying everywhere because your angle stop cracked and fell off… yeah, I need to know that. One is an emergency, the other isn’t even close.