There’s a silent inflation running, unchecked, in many companies I’ve watched up close. It isn’t cost inflation. It isn’t wage inflation. It’s priority inflation.
Each quarter starts with a list of objectives. And that list, week after week, swells. Projects get added because an opportunity is interesting. Initiatives get added because a competitor moved. Tasks get added because an important client asked for something specific.
By the middle of the quarter, the list of “top priorities” is no longer a list. It’s an inventory.
When a list of priorities contains forty entries, it’s no longer a list of priorities. It’s an illusion of control.
I worked with a leadership team that showed me, in a meeting, their priority slide for the quarter. Three columns, twelve rows each, all titled strategic priority. Thirty-six strategic priorities for twelve weeks. When I did the math out loud, someone in the room laughed, but nervously. It was clear, even to them, that it couldn’t work. Yet that slide had been approved, shared with all management, and pushed down to the teams.
The problem with a list of thirty-six priorities isn’t that many won’t get done. That’s obvious. The problem is that, in practice, none of them is truly protected.
When external pressure arrives, a client request, a small crisis, there’s always something on the list that can be paused, because everything looks equally important. Result: what gets paused is whatever has the least internal political weight, not what has the least strategic value. The real priorities, the ones that actually move the company, end up being the ones somebody cares about for career reasons, not for impact.
That’s the most toxic dynamic of priority inflation. It isn’t that you do less. It’s that you do the wrong thing.
There’s an exercise I run with teams in this condition. Take the current list of priorities, and cut it to three. Just three. The three things that, if we get them done well, the quarter is a success, even if everything else is done badly or not at all. And those three, once chosen, get protected radically. Nothing interrupts them, nothing postpones them, nothing takes their place.
The exercise is painful. Almost always, the first time, someone in the room protests that at least five are needed, because there are too many vital things. The companies that keep insisting on this point, in my experience, are the ones where none of the priorities is truly vital, and the lack of clarity gets compensated with quantity.
The companies that accept choosing, even with effort, find something interesting. With three protected priorities, the quarter ends with three solid results, instead of thirty half-finished ones.
It isn’t only a team problem. It’s a personal one too. I know founders who keep twenty-three “weekly objectives” in their Notion, and can’t close Friday with the feeling of having done anything that mattered. Not because they don’t work. They work ten hours a day. But those hours get spread across twenty-three things, and none of them advances at the rate needed to produce a visible result.
The frustration that follows is disproportionate, and gets attributed to volume of work. Volume isn’t the problem. Dilution is.
There’s a specific emotional resistance to saying this isn’t a priority. It feels like giving up. It feels like admitting that something interesting won’t get done. That’s exactly what needs to be borne. A priority, to actually be one, requires that other things stop being one. If there’s nothing you’ve explicitly deprioritised, you haven’t set a priority. You’ve just said you’d like to.
When I review a client’s priorities, one of the first questions is what’s the thing you’ve explicitly decided not to do this quarter?. If there’s nothing, the conversation that follows is almost always about the fact that they haven’t really decided what mattered most yet. It’s that piece, the cutting piece, that makes priorities credible.
Everything important means nothing. Three important things, properly protected, beat thirty things on a list.