a guide to managing priorities in an "always-on" environment
How many times have you had work dropped on you, labeled as a priority? This often comes with an expectation that you will immediately stop everything to focus on this "crucial" task—as if your existing work held no significance whatsoever.
Depending on your job, this scenario might occur weekly or maybe even daily. In my recent article about urgency culture, I explored how overused words lose their meaning. This time, I thought I would consult my old friend the Oxford dictionary:
Priority (noun): The fact or condition of being regarded or treated as more important.
Like its cousin "urgent," priority implies that someone has unilaterally determined the importance of "it"—whatever "it" may be.
Reflecting on my government work, I'm proud of what we accomplished. However, with perspective, I recognize the disproportionate number of 'urgencies' and 'priorities' we confronted. A dear colleague of mine would remind me: "Kelly, we are not saving lives." We were consistently amplifying stress for minimal return.
When everything is a priority, nothing truly is.
Organizations have a finite workforce, and in an era of reduced spending, continuously piling "priority" tasks onto already overwhelmed teams inevitably compromises delivery. Just consider full glass of water: adding more doesn't increase capacity; it simply creates overflow and mess. The real solution isn't adding more, but strategically managing what's already present—either by removing some, redistributing, or expanding capacity.
My journey in understanding priority management began early in my executive career. The standard advice—delegate more and be selective about time allocation—felt incomplete. Simply offloading overwhelming workload onto already-stretched team members didn't seem like a viable solution.
The Priority Trap
In today's fast-paced environment, it's remarkably easy to let others' priorities supersede your own. The pattern is predictable: A senior leader requests your presence in an "important" meeting, an annual report demands your initiative's data review, and suddenly, external demands begin displacing your strategic objectives.
You find yourself caught in a whirlwind of manufactured urgency. Stress mounts, adrenaline surges, and your critical deliverables fall by the wayside—all for work that isn't even your primary responsibility. Throughout my sixteen years in government, I witnessed this pattern repeatedly.
My intervention strategy became straightforward: applying the fundamental 5 Ws from elementary school. What is the task? Who is the audience? When is it due (and is that timeline genuine)? Where is the request originating? Why is it suddenly a priority? Then, I would add the crucial "how"—mapping the task against my multi-year workplan.
A Strategic Solution: The Multi-Year Workplan
To combat this cyclical challenge, I developed a two-year workplan that comprehensively mapped our division's responsibilities against available capacity. While my private sector colleagues might find this approach basic, it proved invaluable in a government environment prone to short-term thinking.
This approach served multiple strategic purposes:
1. Clearly identifying our division's priorities for the next two years
2. Managing organizational expectations
3. Providing a framework for evaluating new requests
This plan was my response when the team faced pressure to take on additional work. It was the tool we could return to, together as a management team to evaluate what existing commitments would need to be delayed or dropped to accommodate the request. This gave me concrete evidence for discussions with senior leadership about the real impact of taking on extra work. While we couldn't always avoid additional assignments, the plan provided a solid foundation for constructive conversations about workload, timelines, and capacity.
Relevance in Today's Context
The proliferation of work in recent years has become unwieldy, characterized by an endless stream of projects, announcements, budget proposals, and supposed priorities. What I find troubling is the persistent desire to keep adding tasks without removing anything from our plates.
Approaches like this will become even more critical amid reduced government spending, where teams will be increasingly pressured to accomplish more with fewer resources. The stark reality is that organizations must either risk employee burnout or make deliberate, strategic choices about priorities—accepting that some work will necessarily be deprioritized.
While it can be hard to release lower-priority work, and governments in particularly have historically struggled with this in my opinion, there's a limit to how many times one can repeat the same approach and expect different results. Mastering priority management—through clear planning and evidence-based decision-making—will be the key to navigating these challenges while maintaining both productivity and team well-being.
