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The Welcomed Death of ASAP
Post-pandemic, the expression’s history proposes a new way forward
The meaning of “ASAP” has always been subjective. It doesn’t denote a specific time; the “P” has always stood for “possible.” That said, here in America, we use the expression to mean “do it now! No, I mean now!” Before the pandemic, we lived in an ASAP world. Our modern lives, our economy, capitalism, American business, all of our desks — they all ran on ASAP, as if it were the very operating system powering us all. American runs on Dunkin’, yes, but it also runs on ASAP. Because of the new nature of modern work — and of modern life — none of us is comfortable waiting for anything anymore. Our phones, laptops, and the constant pinging and ringing have trained us to want, need, and expect the world to respond immediately.
I know it’s 2021. I say “new” because most of us in the workforce right now were not actually born and raised in this relentless environment. I am 43. My class, the Class of 2000, was the first to graduate college in this millenium. And we were one of the first classes to have email when we descended upon American university campuses in the fall of 1996. We entered the workforce — and our long-awaited adulthood — with a new way to communicate: digitally. We quickly learned how to send electronic messages (I was jgambuto226@prodigy.net), and we were the guinea pigs for texting, punching at our phones four times to turn the “7” into an “S.”
Before the birth of the iPhone and the massive ramp-up to digital life, ASAP was an initialism: A.S.A.P. And it was used pretty sparingly. Unless you worked on the trading floor on Wall Street, most people — bosses, co-workers, friends — didn’t ask for things A.S.A.P. At the very least, the initialism was used with a modicum of consideration. Then, to do something “as soon as possible” meant far more than a click. You had to call on the telephone (which had a financial cost) or fax, leave messages, wait for someone to check the answering machine, and travel distances to deliver paperwork, capture a signature, or drop-off a document. Executing tasks took time, so doing something “as soon as possible” meant just that: I can execute the task as soon as it is possible for me to do the five things required to get it done in the physical world, which is fraught with…
