Duck-Duck-Goose
Duck. Duck. Duck. Wait for it... There goes your Tuesday.
Do you remember the game? Everyone sits in a circle. Someone walks around the outside, tapping heads. Duck. Duck. Duck. Harmless touches, predictable rhythm. Then without warning: GOOSE. One person suddenly has to jump up and chase while everyone else watches.
Workplaces play this game too. The person walking the circle moves through the team with routine requests. Small asks. Normal interactions. Duck. Duck. Duck. Then they place their hand on someone’s head and declare them responsible for the surprise emergency, the last-minute deliverable, the crisis they didn’t create. GOOSE. Now sprint.
The Pattern
The Duck-Duck-Gooser (The Gooser, for short) creates chaos through three interconnected patterns:
Poor time management
They agreed to something weeks ago. It got dropped. They remembered ridiculously close to the promised delivery date. Now it’s your emergency. Sometimes they have the integrity to own it: “I know this is my fault.” Often they don’t—they just expect you to fix it.
Process avoidance
They tag you to do something urgently to get around proper channels. When you push back—”Something of this magnitude had to have been known for a long time, this didn’t just come up”—they deflect. The urgency is manufactured to bypass the process they should have followed.
Disrespect for capacity, complexity and skill
They ask you to do something you do well—but in an exceptionally short period compared to what the work actually requires. This isn’t just stressful. It sets you up for potential failure because you don’t get to operate at full capability, flow, and thoroughness. A reasonable timeline would let you do quality work. Their timeline guarantees something’s getting sacrificed.
The result?
Teams become jumpy. Deep work becomes impossible when you’re braced for the tap.
How This Hits Empaths
Empaths are the easiest to tag. You don’t want to let people down. You’re reliable. You respond. These qualities make you visible when someone needs a goose.
The cost isn’t just the surprise tasks. It’s the hypervigilance. The constant low-grade anxiety of never knowing when you’ll be selected. Your nervous system can’t settle. You can’t sink into deep work because part of you is waiting for the tap.
This erodes nervous system safety slowly but relentlessly. Even on days when you don’t get tagged, you’ve burned energy bracing for it.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Monday morning standup. Your manager casually asks each person about their weekend. Duck. Duck. Duck. Then: “Oh, and by the way, the client needs that analysis by tomorrow morning. I know we didn’t discuss this, but you’ve got this, right?” GOOSE. You’re now responsible for work that requires three days, due in eighteen hours, decided without your input.
The pattern teaches you that calm moments are temporary. Safety is an illusion. The tap is coming. You just don’t know when.
Tiny Tools for Tiny Spaces
Here are a few things to try out when you find yourself in these situations.
Somatic Reset
Calm your body, and your mind will follow
When you feel the hypervigilance building—shoulders tight, breath shallow, stomach clenched—your body is telling you something true. The tap might come. That doesn’t mean you have to live in readiness for it.
Place one hand on your chest, one on your belly. Breathe slowly. Say quietly: “Right now, I am not being chased. Right now, I am here.” Ground yourself in present safety rather than future threat.
Boundary Statement
An action statement that supports your values & capacity, “If X happens, then Y will result.”
“If you continue to assign urgent work without advance notice, then I will need to deprioritize other commitments to accommodate it—and I’ll need you to communicate those changes to the affected stakeholders.”
Clarity Question
Minimizes misunderstanding, encourages alignment
“Something of this magnitude had to have been known for a while. When did this first come up, and what prevented it from being addressed earlier?”
This question exposes whether the urgency is real or manufactured. It names the time management failure and the process being bypassed.
Prevention Tool
Being proactive protects, whereas reactivity drains
Keep a simple log of surprise urgent requests—what was asked, when, the timeline given, whether it could have been anticipated earlier. You’ll see patterns. This data protects you from gaslighting when they claim “this never happens.”
Advanced Tiny Tool for Big Empaths:
When tagged with surprise urgency that doesn’t respect your capacity or the quality of your work, consider saying:
“I understand this feels urgent to you. The timeline you’re requesting doesn’t allow me to deliver the quality this work requires. I can deliver [realistic scope] by [urgent deadline], or I can deliver [full scope] by [realistic deadline]. You choose which you need more.”
Why this is advanced:
You’re naming the impossible tradeoff they’re forcing. You’re demonstrating you manage your capacity even when they don’t manage their planning. You’re making visible that demanding quality work in unreasonable timeframes sets you up for failure. You’re refusing to inherit their crisis while still offering realistic options.
The boundary is this:
Their poor time management is not your emergency to absorb. Their process avoidance is not your problem to enable. Their disrespect for your capacity and skill is not your obligation to accommodate. You can help—on terms that don’t sacrifice quality, your other commitments, or your wellbeing.
The Truth Underneath
The Gooser doesn’t always realize what they’re doing. Sometimes they genuinely believe the urgency just materialized. Sometimes they know they dropped it and feel guilty. Sometimes they’re deliberately using urgency to bypass processes that would slow them down.
Regardless of intent, the impact on you is the same: hypervigilance, disrupted flow, work that can’t be done properly, and the ongoing expectation that you’ll catch what they drop.
Here’s what you need to know: their chaos is not your calling. Their lack of planning is not your emergency. Their manufactured urgency is not your obligation to perpetual readiness.
The Gooser will keep playing the game. You cannot stop them from walking the circle and tapping heads. You can, however, decide you’re not playing. You can refuse to jump up and chase. You can stay seated even when they yell GOOSE.
You’re not responsible for catching every surprise they throw. You’re responsible for managing your capacity in a way that’s sustainable. Those two things often conflict. Choose sustainability. Every single time.
Next time someone yells GOOSE, remember: you can walk instead of sprint.
Now it’s your turn.
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