Picture this: You’re standing in front of a vending machine at 2 AM, desperately jabbing the coin return button because your Snickers bar is dangling by a thread. You could walk away, find another machine, maybe even discover a 24-hour bakery with fresh croissants down the street. But no—you’re committed to this mechanical hostage situation because you need that sugar rush right now.
Welcome to your entire relationship with ASAP, my friend.
Full Transparency: I have been toying with this blog post idea for the past several weeks. Researching and scribbling points as time went by. Even got our designer at ISD Global to craft something( see below) and our video editor to conceptualise a video as well which you might want to watch here. It could have been published probably in June. But, instead, I asked: “What’s possible with this idea that I haven’t explored yet?”
The ASAP version would have gotten published sooner. The possible version might actually change how you think about time, decisions, and what matters.
Which would you rather read?
The greatest achievements in human history—from the pyramids to the internet—weren’t built by people asking “How soon?” They were built by people asking “What if?”
You feel it, don’t you? That tiny, digital fist that clenches in your gut the moment you see those four capital letters. ASAP.
It pings into your inbox, slides into a Slack channel, is muttered in a meeting. It’s the Swiss Army knife of corporate vocabulary—seemingly versatile, ultimately clunky, and almost always used to pry open a can of urgency that didn’t need opening.
We’ve been conditioned to treat “ASAP” as the pinnacle of priority. The alpha and omega of action. But I’m here to tell you, with the conviction of a man who has seen one too many “URGENT!!” emails about the font size on a footer, that ASAP is a trap. A sleight of hand that steals the Possible to worship the Soon.
It’s not a timeframe; it’s an anxiety-induced coma dressed as productivity.
The genius of the acronym is its disguise. It sounds so reasonable! A plea. Almost apologetic. As Soon As Possible. Who could argue with that? We all want things to be possible!
But that’s the heist. In practice, the ‘P’ is quietly kidnapped, thrown under the bus, and never seen again. What’s left is just “AS” – a frantic, breathless, panicked race to Just Do It Now.
The focus shifts violently from “Is this even a good idea?”to “How fast can I make this look done?”Quality, strategy, sanity—they are all sacrificed at the altar of speed. We become short-order cooks in the kitchen of innovation, slinging greasy ideas instead of crafting a Michelin-star meal.
You’re not being asked to do what’s possible; you’re being demanded to do what’s immediate. And there is a galactic difference.
Everyone talks about software bugs and missed deadlines. Let’s talk about the weird stuff. The history rewritten by ASAP.
Back in 1772, a Dutch orchestra commissioner, notoriously impatient, sent a letter to a young Mozart demanding a new symphony “a.s.a.p.”(or its 18th-century equivalent, “with utmost haste, post-haste!”). Mozart, needing the guilders, cranked out Symphony No. 22 in C major, K. 162, in a matter of days. It’s… fine. Pleasant. But, you guessed it, forgettable. Meanwhile, the pieces he was allowed to marinate on—like his later piano concertos—changed music forever. The world got soon instead of sublime. We lost a possible masterpiece for a hurried assignment.
1950s America fell in love with instant coffee because it solved the ASAP problem perfectly. Why wait 5 minutes for coffee to brew when you could have it in 30 seconds?
The trade-off nobody calculated: Instant coffee didn’t just sacrifice taste—it rewired our expectations about what coffee could be. For three decades, Americans forgot that coffee could be complex, nuanced, or worth savoring.
Then came Starbucks, which committed the ultimate sin against ASAP culture: they made coffee slower. Espresso machines that took 25 seconds per shot. Baristas who ground beans fresh. Foam art that served no functional purpose. The “inefficient” result? Starbucks turned a $2 commodity into a $30 billion cultural experience. The deeper truth: Sometimes the fastest way to transform an industry is to completely ignore what the industry thinks it needs ASAP.
Dr. Sarah Chen, trauma surgeon: “The doctors who kill patients are often the ones who rush. The ones who save lives take an extra 10 seconds to think clearly, even when every instinct screams ‘move faster.'”The paradox here is that even when speed is actually critical, effectiveness trumps urgency.
1969: America put humans on the moon. The obvious next step? Mars ASAP, right? 56 years later: Still no humans on Mars. From an ASAP perspective, this looks like spectacular failure. But consider what happened instead: By taking time to ask “What’s possible with space technology?”, we got:
GPS (which revolutionized everything from dating to pizza delivery)
Weather satellites (that save thousands of lives annually)
Communication satellites (that made global internet possible)
Materials science breakthroughs (that improved everything from medical devices to athletic equipment)
The Prognosis or rather The profound realisation: Rushing to Mars ASAP would have given us a few footprints in red dirt. Exploring what was possible with space technology gave us the modern world.
The most radical act in our ASAP world? Taking your time.
The rebellion is not in saying “no.” It’s in reclaiming the question. When ASAP comes hurtling at you, your new power move is to gently, deftly, and irreverently drag the “P”(possible) back into the light.
The problem with ASAP is not urgency. Urgency is fine. Firefighters need urgency. Paramedics live on urgency. The problem is false urgency—the kind that confuses soon with possible. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, he didn’t say: “We’ll become the Everything Store ASAP.” He said: “We’ll start with books. Possible.” When ISRO put Chandrayaan on the moon, it wasn’t ASAP. It was “As Possible Given 30% of NASA’s Budget.” Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Not ASAP. Not even close. It took 4 years, neck cramps, and a paintbrush dipped in stubbornness.
If these giants had fallen for the ASAP trap, we’d have half-written books, half-built rockets, and a chapel ceiling that looks like it was whitewashed by a drunk intern.
ASAP is the currency of the anxious. Possible is the language of the impactful. Soon is the Opiate. Possible is the Oxygen.
Stop racing to be soon. Start striving to be significant. The world is clogged with the mediocre results of hurried work. What it desperately needs is the brilliant, the durable, the truly innovative—the things that are only ever possible when we give them the time and space to breathe.
So the next time that four-letter acronym assaults your peace, smile. Remember the forgotten symphony. Take a deep breath.
And go do what’s Possible. Because urgent and important are NOT two sides of the same coin.