What Everyone Gets Wrong About Priorities

There should be no plural of priority. Your team can have one priority. You can have one priority. Pri-ori-TY.

Interestingly, for centuries, nobody ever used priority as a plural. It was only in the last century that people started to talk about priorities:

“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality.” ~ Greg McKeown Essentialism

If you stop to think about it, if you have multiple priorities, nothing is a priority. Which is why it is hard to achieve the things you really want to achieve.

And so, your task for today is this. Pick up your priority list and decide which is THE priority. Then, pick up your to-do list and work out which three tasks are most important for that priority. Finally, do those things.

If you want to ask me more about this, just hit reply.

See you tomorrow, Stephen

If you have a healthy team conversation, but are not getting things done, there might be other colleagues who need to hear this message. Why not forward it now and start the conversation?

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