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Summary
This is part 1 of a 3-part series on prioritization, led by Harry Max, author of Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. Part 2 | Part 3 Prioritization is a deceptively tricky topic that lurks behind the scenes but informs everything. It’s a fundamental skill for organizations, teams, and ICs, and most people accept that it’s essential, but we are not taught how to do it. You can prioritize almost anything, not just goals, projects, and tasks; values, for example. Our main challenge is finding new methods to reach goals amongst multiple teams with conflicting priorities. There is some good news: there is a repeatable process model. And some approaches are better than others, especially for organizations and teams. This conversation will take the topic to a new level. It will also help you gain a profound new level of clarity about creating better plans and making smarter decisions.
Key Insights
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Prioritization is fundamentally about allocating limited resources, not just managing personal productivity or time.
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Top organizations prioritize effectively but rarely label or treat it as a formal process.
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People often confuse prioritization with sequencing tasks, but they require distinct approaches.
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Priorities must have defined attributes with measurable values to be meaningfully compared.
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It is possible and common to have multiple simultaneous priorities due to conflicting goals or resource constraints.
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A well-structured prioritization process can be completed quickly if participants focus on value and urgency, avoiding over-analysis.
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Deadlines and urgency should be distinguished between real and perceived, influencing prioritization accordingly.
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Effective prioritization requires clear ownership, typically one person responsible to anticipate, observe, orient, decide, act, and monitor.
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Regularly revisiting and migrating priorities, like in bullet journaling, helps teams adapt to changing information.
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Communication gaps between roles, such as product managers and design leaders, often stem from misaligned understanding of what is being prioritized—work or outcomes.
Notable Quotes
"Prioritization is not just for your own work, it’s for teams and whole organizations."
"Individuals tend to confuse prioritization with personal productivity or time management."
"Your top priority doesn’t have to be the thing you choose, but it tells you what’s important to you."
"If anything’s on fire, go fix it is a perfectly valid top priority."
"You can have more than one priority at a time because they might have very different value and urgency profiles."
"Priorities aren’t priorities until they’ve been prioritized with attributes and values."
"If you don’t have enough information to prioritize, put the items on a dartboard and throw a dart to start the conversation."
"The real trick is being able to say no gracefully and communicate your priorities effectively."
"The top priority is often the lack of a priority, resulting in teams spending 50% of their time jumping between priorities."
"Ownership means belonging to the person who anticipates, observes, or monitors the prioritization process—not distributed ownership."
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