The Art of Not Answering the Second Ping

There’s a thread doing the rounds on r/auscorp today that’s basically a support group in disguise. Someone asks how to deal with colleagues who fire off an email, then ping you on Teams twice before lunch asking for an update, on a task with no actual deadline. Forty comments in, and the group has more or less converged on a philosophy. Don’t respond straight away. When you do respond, don’t apologise. Ask who’s driving the urgency. Watch them squirm.

I read the whole thing over batch brew this morning and felt something between amusement and recognition. I’ve been in IT long enough to know this pattern intimately. It’s not really about the task. It’s about someone else’s anxiety being outsourced to you, one notification at a time.

What struck me was how many people in that thread had built an entire quiet resistance movement around a single Teams status. Scheduling replies for end of day. Reserving the last fifteen minutes of every hour to deal with interruptions. One person’s whole strategy was just refusing to acknowledge the ping until the actual deadline showed up, on the theory that urgency invented on the spot doesn’t deserve a real-time reaction. There’s a kind of dignity in that. Slow-walking someone until they either forget about it or admit it was never that important. Usually it’s the former.

I’ve worked with people like this on both sides of the ledger, mind you. Early in my career I was probably the one doing the pinging, fresh out of uni and convinced that my task was the only task anyone had. It took a manager pulling me aside, not unkindly, to point out that everyone’s inbox looks like a triage ward and mine wasn’t special. That stuck with me longer than most performance reviews have.

The bit of the discussion that got me thinking harder was the framing that this isn’t really an etiquette problem, it’s a resourcing one. “Doing more with less” gets said so often in corporate Australia it’s basically wallpaper now, but somewhere underneath the phrase is a genuine structural issue: not enough people, too many priorities, and no shared understanding of what’s actually urgent versus what just feels urgent to the person asking. When there’s no clear owner of priority, everyone becomes their own emergency broadcast system. The Teams ping isn’t rudeness, most of the time. It’s someone drowning quietly and grabbing the nearest thing.

None of which means you have to drop everything for it. That’s the tension I can’t quite resolve, and I don’t think the thread resolved it either. You can feel for the person under pressure and still refuse to let their pressure become yours. Both things are true at once, and most days I just try to hold them without picking a side.

What I liked most, honestly, was how constructive the whole thread ended up being. No pile-on, no doom about the state of work. Just a few hundred people quietly trading scripts, sanding down the same problem from different angles. “I have competing priorities, I’ll get to this by X.” “Please raise a ticket.” “Who’s driving the urgency of this?” Simple lines, and every one of them buys back a bit of control without torching a relationship.

I don’t have a tidy answer for how you fix a workplace culture that runs on manufactured urgency. I do know that the small, unglamorous act of not replying within four minutes, and not feeling guilty about it, is doing more good than any wellbeing webinar I’ve sat through. Some days that’s the whole win. Not solving the system, just refusing to let it run through you at full speed.