If a firefighter receives a call in the wee hours of the morning, they have to respond right away. It’s their duty and that expectation is made clear with the role.
If you’re not a firefighter and you receive a work call or message at odd hours, do you feel like you have to respond like a firefighter would?
Sure, emergencies come up from time to time and need to be managed, but if you’re not a firefighter and your default state at work is constant firefighting, the fires aren’t your real problem: your real problem is systemic.
While it’s not easy to do when you’re busy and exhausted putting out fire after fire, if you want to get out of a perpetual state of firefighting, you need to take a step back and investigate what your workplace system is doing well—starting fires—and how it is designed to do that.
Then, if you wish to change that, you can leverage this understanding to redesign the system to do something else well instead so you can get out of the heat and stop the constant firefighting.
