In recent times, I’ve personally and vicariously encountered a reoccurring situation concerning competing needs and tasks. It can be summarized to lack of prioritization. Fundamentally, I think we all understand prioritization. If we need to address problems in a house to prepare for a visit, and the house has a door that needs to be repaired, an electrical socket that shorts out, and a fire on the stove it is pretty easy to decide what problem will be addressed first. The consequences of some problems increase with time. The fire will get more unwieldly, a bill will incur fees, the door may allow unwanted water or insects to enter a structure. These consequences differ in severity and growth speed.

The problem I and others encounter is that the use of the word “priority” is being used not to express some ranking of importance, but to express something that they wish to have done. There is a wish for all things to be done coupled with the lack of resources (especially time or manpower resources) to do it and meet deadlines. This creates tensions and problems. There may be times when conditions on a project result in this problem as a temporary and short-lived problem. But there are also groups for which these conditions are their mode of operation. Trends in differences in how I see these problems dealt with correlate to age and work experience among the people through which I’ve observed them. For the younger and less experienced workers, this creates unmanageable conditions is misery as they find their life being consumed by these tasks taking up more hours, after-hours, and weekends. The “solution” to these problems have been to find another job (if there is time to find one). That’s not an entirely unreasonable solution; sometimes these conditions are a reflection of other chaos within an organization.

Older or more experienced employees may do the same, or they may give reasonable pushback. Someone I spoke with was out of town to perform a deployment for a marketing event at some sports event. A lot of time was spent for setup, walking the client through the parts of the event and fixtures, interacting with media, and keeping hired staff in line. While this was going on people in the office, though aware of the event, were sending request for work to be done with deadlines of the next day. The person asked how they should prioritize these requests and got back the “everything is a priority.” The worker let them know “not everything will be done.” The reasonable refusal to satisfy all requests was a forcing function that resulted in the requests getting rankings.

I most recently encountered a similar situation when I was preparing to leave town for a project. For a previous project, a decision was made to change the requirements (something that happened a lot on that project). On the Sunday that I was going to use to finish packing and get things in order at home I found myself on an unscheduled team meeting. I hadn’t planned to be on a 9am meeting on a Sunday, or for that meeting to last 5 hours. At the end of that 5 hours there were changes that I needed to implement and other requests. There was a request that when I get done with the changes, that we have another meeting so that we could live-test them and make alterations during a meeting. I gave a polite refusal and plainly stated that the meeting had already caused disturbances to personal activities and activities for my other project. I told them I wouldn’t be participating in their live testing and let them know that their full list of requests will not be addressed today or this week. This, once again, gave the necessary motivation to think about importance rankings.

My personal and vicarious experiences might not be representative of wider trends. But they do form my views. I am getting the impression that “priority” is being used more as corporate jargon. That it is being used in a way that often differs from the conventional usage of the word is a bit disappointing. But it appears that helping someone understand that all desires being satisfied is not an option (and being steadfast in doing so) is a solution for motivating others to participate in ranking priorities.

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