Ten Priorities Means You Have Not Picked One

Picture the last afternoon of a two-day leadership offsite. The whiteboard has been rewritten three times. The head of sales wants the enterprise tier. The head of product wants the new onboarding flow. The CTO wants six months to pay down the agent platform before it falls over. Marketing wants the rebrand, finance wants the pricing change, and the CEO wants all of it to land before the next board meeting.

By five o’clock the list has ten items on it, far too many priorities for one engineering team, and every leader in the room has a line with their name next to it. People are relieved that nobody had to lose. The CEO calls it alignment and everyone flies home.

Six weeks later the enterprise tier and the onboarding flow both need the same two senior engineers for the same month. Both are company priorities, and the list has no way to say which one wins. So the head of sales sends a DM to the CEO, the CEO says “do enterprise first,” and the onboarding team finds out when its two engineers stop showing up to its planning call.

That DM settled the company’s priority for the half. The people who lost were not in it, and nobody wrote it down.

Two Ways to Run a Team

There are two ways to come out of that offsite. One is the list of ten. The other is a single priority, written so plainly that it wins every tie without anyone needing to ask.

On a slide, the two look almost the same: a title that says “Priorities” over real work that got nods in the room. The difference shows up later, on the first Tuesday when two good things want the same people.

Leaders pick the list of ten for reasons that feel decent. No project gets cut in front of the owner’s peers, and no executive has to be told their work comes second. The room stays warm, and a warm room feels like a healthy team.

The word itself argues against the list. Greg McKeown points out in Essentialism that “priority” came into English in the 1400s, singular, meaning the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for about five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did people start saying “priorities,” as if several things could each come first.

Path A: Too Many Priorities

The list works like this: anything important enough to argue about at the offsite gets a line. Each line gets an owner and a target, and the owners go build.

It buys the leader a calm room. Every executive leaves with something to defend, and the CEO avoids the conversation where one of them hears “yours is second.” For a few weeks the list even looks like it is working, because nothing has collided yet.

Then something collides. Two projects need the same engineers, or the same launch week, or the same slice of the budget. The list cannot settle it, because both items are on it with equal weight. So the tie goes to the person who pushes hardest, or to the leader in a side conversation, and it gets settled in private.

The leader still makes the call, only now without a record. The trade happens anyway, and nobody can see who made it or why, so nobody can argue with it, learn from it, or plan around it. The team learns to read the plan from whatever gets staffed, and it stops reading the official one.

This is a cousin of a failure I wrote about two weeks ago, the number no one can hit honestly. In that piece the target had no route; on a list of ten, every target might have a route, and there are still too many of them for the people you have.

Path B: One Priority

The single priority works from one sentence: “When this conflicts with anything else, this wins.” If the company priority this half is the enterprise tier, then in the six-week collision nobody sends a DM. The engineers go to enterprise, the onboarding owner already knows it, and the conversation that matters happened back at the offsite, with everyone in the room.

The cost lands on the leader, because the trade is public. The head of product hears, in front of peers, that onboarding comes second this half. The leader can be wrong where everyone can see it, and will be asked about it at the next offsite.

What it buys is speed at every desk. An engineer choosing between two pieces of work can decide alone. A manager deciding whether to lend someone to another team knows the answer before the request lands. People stop escalating ties, because the tie was settled before it happened.

One company priority does not leave every team without one. Each team can have its own single priority for the half, written so that it never beats the company priority in a tie. The onboarding team still owns onboarding and still knows what it is pushing. It also knows what happens the week enterprise needs its engineers.

The best-known case is Steve Jobs at Apple in 1997. At that year’s developer conference he said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” After he came back, Apple cut its product line down to four: a consumer and a pro machine, each as a desktop and a portable.

The Real Difference

A priority does two jobs. It tells people where to put spare effort, and it settles ties. A list of ten does the first job poorly and cannot do the second at all. The tie is the moment that tests a priority: people cannot do everything and need to know what to drop. A list of ten records what the leadership team hopes for and has nothing to say right then.

Aristotle had a precise word for the step most offsites skip: prohairesis, deliberate choice. The word carries the sense of taking one thing before another. In his account you first deliberate about how to reach an end, and then you choose, and the choice settles what you will do. The ten items on the offsite whiteboard are that kind of thing: competing ways to reach an end the company already has, a business that keeps its customers and grows. You deliberate among them, and then you have to pick. A list that ranks nothing has done the deliberating and stopped short of the choice. Aristotle also thought choice shows character more clearly than actions do, which fits what teams see. They learn who their leader is from what that leader is willing to put second.

I see the same thing every day at my desk with agents. Give an agent instructions with ten “top priorities” and it guesses every time two of them conflict, with a different guess from one run to the next. Add one rule for what wins a conflict and it makes the same call every time, fast. Teams work the same way. A team with one priority can move as fast as its best people, because they do not have to stop and ask.

How to Pick One and Keep It

1. Write the tie-breaker sentence. Pick the item that does the most for your customers and the business this half, not the one whose owner argued loudest. Finish this line, “When __ conflicts with anything else, __ wins,” and test it on a real conflict from last month. If people would still have argued after reading it, the sentence is too vague. Rewrite it until it would have ended last month’s fight without a meeting.

2. Move the rest of the list to standards. Most of a long priority list is work that has to keep working: uptime, security, payroll, customer support response times. Those are standards. You do not trade them away, and you also do not chase them. Call them standards in the plan, so the one priority stands alone on its own line. Sort a list of ten this way and you may find one priority, five standards, and four things you were never going to get to this half.

3. Tell the people who own the losing items. Say it in the room, and then say it again one-on-one. “Onboarding is second this half. Here is what that means for your team, and here is when we will look at it again.” Cutting good work is the hardest part, which I wrote about in the elimination discipline. A cut that people discover on their own costs you their trust along with the project.

If you are the one whose work comes second, your part matters as much as the leader’s. Make your case in the room, as hard as you want. Once the call is made, back it in how you staff and plan, and do not reopen it by DM. A side message to the CEO after the decision is the same private tie-breaking this whole piece is about, sent from the other chair.

4. Hold it long enough to learn something. A priority that changes every two weeks gives the team the same problem as ten priorities, spread out over time. Pick a horizon, usually a quarter or a half, and keep the priority for the whole stretch unless the business itself changes. Write down what would make you change it, so that any change is a decision you can explain to the team.

5. Ask the tie question every week. In your weekly leadership meeting, ask: “What conflicts came up this week, and did the priority settle them?” If people are still sending you DMs to break ties, either the sentence is not clear or you have not held it. Both are yours to fix.

Final Thoughts

The list of ten feels kind on the day you write it. It spares every executive in the room from hearing that their work comes second, and it spares the person at the head of the table from having to say it. Then it charges the team for that kindness every week, in ties settled out of sight and in people who stop believing the plan.

One priority costs the leader a hard conversation, once, in front of the people it affects. After that, everyone who works for you can make the call at their own desk, and the strategy they follow is the one you chose in the room.

If you want to work with leaders who are willing to say which project comes second and stand behind it, MasteryLab is where that happens.

FAQ

Why is having too many priorities bad?

The hardest job a priority does is settle ties. When two good pieces of work need the same people or the same week, the priority says which one wins. A list of ten cannot do that, so the tie gets settled later, in private, by whoever pushes hardest or by the leader in a side conversation. The team stops trusting the list and starts watching what gets staffed.

Was the word priority always singular?

According to Greg McKeown in Essentialism, the word “priority” came into English in the 1400s and meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for roughly five hundred years. People only started talking about priorities, plural, in the 1900s.

What is the difference between a priority and a standard?

A standard is something that must keep working and that you will not trade away, like uptime, security, or paying people on time. A priority is the one thing you are pushing forward that wins when it conflicts with other new work. Long priority lists are mostly standards plus a few real bets, and splitting them makes the one real priority visible.

What does prohairesis mean?

prohairesis is Aristotle’s word for deliberate choice. The word itself carries the idea of taking one thing before another. For Aristotle a choice comes after deliberation and settles what you will do, which is why a list that ranks nothing has not yet made a choice.