Not Everything Is Priority #1: How Business & Technology Leaders Decide What Truly Matters
By Incountr
If everything is “priority one,” nothing is.
Teams drown in “urgent” work, change programs stall, and roadmaps balloon with good ideas that don’t add up to results. The fix isn’t a louder rallying cry—it’s a better way to decide. This article gives leaders, change agents, and transformation stakeholders a practical playbook to separate true priorities from the noise and keep momentum where it counts.
Why treating everything as #1 quietly kills performance
When leaders call too many things top priority, three silent costs pile up:
Context-switching tax: Every time people jump between tasks, they lose time and focus. Decades of cognitive research suggest that even brief task switches create “mental blocks” that can sap up to 40% of productive time. That isn’t laziness—it’s how brains work.
Strategy fog: If your people can’t see a clear link between work and strategy, they hedge their bets and try to do it all. Even Harvard Business Review has noted how common it is for employees to lack a line of sight to strategy and, as a result, struggle to prioritize.
Change fatigue: Too many initiatives at once stretch attention, goodwill, and energy. Gartner’s guidance: build resilience and be intentional about load, or change capacity collapses.
Bottom line: Prioritization isn’t a soft skill; it’s an operating system for transformation.
Start with strategy: anchor priorities to your “True North”
Before you rank anything, make sure you’re climbing the right mountain. A crisp “True North” ties every candidate initiative to the outcomes that matter (growth, cost, risk, experience). McKinsey frames this as using strategy as the guide and structuring work across a few core streams so you can move fast without losing coherence.
Quick litmus test for any item on your list:
Which strategic objective does this advance?
How would we measure its impact on that objective?
What must stop or slip if we say “yes” to this?
If you can’t answer those in a sentence, it’s not a priority—it’s a wish.
Choose one (or two) frameworks—and use them consistently
You don’t need ten models. You need one your leaders will actually use. Here are four proven options that cover most enterprise situations:
1) Eisenhower Matrix: Urgent vs. Important (great for operations & week-to-week clarity)
Do now: important + urgent
Schedule: important + not urgent
Delegate: not important + urgent
Eliminate: not important + not urgent
This is perfect for operational teams sifting daily signals from noise. It trains the organization to protect time for “important but not urgent” work—like capability building—so you never live only in fire drills.
2) MoSCoW Method: Must / Should / Could / Won’t (ideal for scope and release planning)
Must: non-negotiable items required to meet the objective
Should: valuable, but not mission-critical
Could: nice-to-have enhancements
Won’t (this time): explicitly out of scope for this cycle
MoSCoW shines when you need to control scope creep and align expectations with stakeholders, especially in product and change releases.
3) Impact–Effort (Value–Effort) Matrix: Quick wins vs. strategic bets (great for portfolio triage)
Map ideas on a 2×2 grid: High/Low Impact × High/Low Effort.
Prioritize high-impact/low-effort “quick wins.”
Time-box or stage-gate high-impact/high-effort big bets.
Use this to thin a long list fast and to socialize trade-offs visually with senior stakeholders.
4) Scoring Models for product & transformation portfolios
RICE (Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort): Helps de-bias bets by making assumptions explicit and weighting confidence. Great when you have customer or user data to feed the model.
WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First): Rank by Cost of Delay ÷ Job Size to maximize economic throughput—core to SAFe and useful beyond it when you’re sequencing work across teams.
A 7-step, repeatable Strategic Prioritization Process
Think of this as your operating rhythm. Run it quarterly at portfolio level and monthly at team level.
1) Inventory everything on your plate
Compile the full list of initiatives, projects, major features/epics, and operational improvements. Include who’s asking, expected outcomes, dependencies, and rough sizing.
2) Tie each item to strategy—explicitly
For every item: name the objective, the metric you’ll move, and the timeframe. If an item can’t show a direct line to outcomes, park it in “Explore” or “Won’t (this time).” (This step alone eliminates a surprising amount of noise.)
3) Score with a single framework
For enterprise/product portfolios, use RICE or WSJF.
For change scope, use MoSCoW.
For operational demand, use Eisenhower or a team-level Impact–Effort grid.
Examples you can copy:
RICE example:
Reach: 5,000 users/quarter
Impact: “High” (3)
Confidence: 70% (0.7)
Effort: 8 person-weeks
Score = (5,000 × 3 × 0.7) ÷ 8 = 1,312.5 → compelling
WSJF example:
Cost of Delay (business value + time criticality + risk reduction) = 24
Job size = 8
WSJF = 24 ÷ 8 = 3 → sequence ahead of items with lower WSJF
(If these feel abstract, don’t overthink the precision—consistency beats accuracy. With each cycle, your scores will get sharper.)
4) Check capacity & set WIP limits
Even “right” priorities fail if you overload the system. Use work-in-progress (WIP) limits to cap how many initiatives run concurrently per team or value stream. This reduces context switching, surfaces bottlenecks, and improves throughput. Start by limiting to what your teams can truly finish in the window.
5) Sequence work intentionally
Front-load must-have regulatory, risk, and customer-commitment items.
Alternate big bets with quick wins to keep visible momentum.
Bundle enabling work (platform, data quality, automation) with value-delivery slices so enablement isn’t perpetually deferred.
6) Re-prioritize on a cadence
Make re-prioritization a standing meeting with a clear agenda: new data, risks, dependencies, delivery burnup, and capacity shifts. If everything becomes urgent weekly, your intake and WIP policies are the real problem.
7) Communicate decisions—and what you’re not doing
Clarity builds trust. Publish a one-page “Now / Next / Later / Won’t” view. For each “Won’t,” say why (e.g., low reach, low strategic fit, too big for this quarter), and what would change your mind (e.g., evidence of demand, regulatory trigger, or a smaller MVP).
The Priority Playbook: rules that keep you honest
Use these as operating guardrails across the org.
One list to rule them all. Shadow lists create shadow work. Maintain a single, visible backlog per portfolio and a clear intake path.
No “priority inflation.” If a new #1 enters, something else drops. Demand the trade-off in the same meeting.
Limit WIP ruthlessly. Throughput rises when people finish more and start less; WIP limits make that real and reduce context-switching.
Make assumptions explicit. RICE’s Confidence forces debates into the open (“What would raise our confidence from 50% to 80%?”).
Sequence by economics, not politics. WSJF bakes Cost of Delay into the math so small, high-value items aren’t stuck behind large, slow projects.
Protect capacity for change. Gartner’s research on resilience underscores that blasting people with simultaneous changes backfires; pace matters.
How the frameworks work—at a glance (copy/paste cheat sheet)
Eisenhower Matrix (ops & time management)
Q1 Do | Q2 Schedule | Q3 Delegate | Q4 Eliminate
Purpose: defend time for important, build habits that starve the “urgency trap.”
MoSCoW (scope & stakeholder alignment)
Must | Should | Could | Won’t (this time)
Purpose: prevent scope creep, ensure “Won’t” is explicit—an antidote to trying to please everyone.
Impact–Effort Matrix (portfolio triage)
Quick wins | Big bets | Fill-ins | Time sinks
Purpose: thin the list fast, visualize trade-offs for execs.
RICE (product & transformation roadmap)
Formula: (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort
Purpose: compare unlike things with shared math; reward high-impact, lower-effort, high-confidence items.
WSJF (flow & sequencing)
Formula: Cost of Delay ÷ Job Size
Purpose: maximize economic throughput; continuously re-rank as facts change.
Avoid these common prioritization traps
“Everything’s urgent” culture
If you escalate everything, teams ignore escalations. Use Eisenhower language and reserve “urgent” for true time-critical risk or customer promises.Counting votes instead of value
Popularity isn’t a strategy. RICE makes the assumptions visible; WSJF forces you to put “cost of delay” into the conversation.Overloading teams
If your WIP column looks like a Christmas tree, your “priorities” are really a wish list. Introduce WIP limits per team/value stream and watch cycle time fall.Skipping enablement work
If you never prioritize platform, data quality, or automation, your future priorities will always cost more. Bundle enablement with customer-visible slices.Fuzzy definitions of “done”
A backlog of “95% done” items delivers 0% value. Define “done” in business terms (released, adopted, outcome measured) and score accordingly.
Example: turning a long wish list into a focused plan
Context: A tech-enabled service company has 18 “priority #1” items for Q4, including a mobile refresh, a pricing experiment, a data platform upgrade, four compliance fixes, and a retention play.
What they do:
Inventory & align each item to strategy (growth, margin, risk, experience).
Score with RICE for growth and experience work; WSJF for risk/compliance work.
Set WIP limits of 2 concurrent epics per squad, 1 cross-team platform initiative.
Sequence:
Now: compliance fix (WSJF 4.0), retention nudge (RICE 1,150)
Next: pricing experiment (RICE 980), platform upgrade phase 1 (WSJF 3.2)
Later: mobile refresh (RICE 520) after platform phase 1
Won’t (this time): AI chatbot pilot (RICE 180, low confidence)
Communicate with a one-pager and office hours; track a visible burn-up by outcome, not just story points.
Result: Fewer things in flight; faster time to value; teams know what not to work on.
Make prioritization stick: rituals, artifacts, behaviors
Rituals
Quarterly portfolio review: Re-score top 20 items; confirm WIP and sequencing.
Monthly re-prioritization: Adjust to new data; enforce “if in, what’s out.”
Weekly flow check: WIP adherence, blockers, burn-up to outcomes.
Artifacts
Priority ledger (single source of truth): shows score, owner, dependencies, start/finish, and expected outcome metric.
Now / Next / Later / Won’t map, shared org-wide.
Decision log: short notes on why something moved (prevents déjà vu debates).
Behaviors
Say “no” with a reason. “Not now because…” preserves relationships and credibility.
Reward finishing, not starting. Celebrate closing loops, retiring work in progress, and killing low-value ideas early.
Protect focus time. Leaders model no-meeting blocks and discourage Slack-driven thrash—your brain (and APA) will thank you.
Conclusion: focus is your force multiplier
Clarity about what isn’t priority #1 is the hallmark of effective leadership. Anchor to strategy, use one framework consistently, cap WIP, and communicate decisions with courage and precision. Do that, and you’ll discover something paradoxical: by doing less at once, you deliver far more over time.