Stop Pluralizing Your Priorities
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Did you know priority was never meant to be plural?
I stumbled into this after a conversation last week and went down a tiny research rabbit hole. Turns out the word only started showing up in its plural form in business language in the mid-1900s. That tracks. That’s about the era when more started becoming the measure of everything, so of course we’d start talking about priorities instead of just one.
Here’s the definition I kept coming back to: a priority is something considered more important than other matters and must be dealt with first. Singular. First. Not a list.
I’ve been wrestling with this in a small peer group I’m part of, where our first order of business was eliminating things, in service of reducing our cognitive load. What’s been hard for me, and what I’m still honing, is learning to identify THE priority for the day, separate from the 3-5 goals for the day, separate again from the hundred little tasks that live underneath both. Those are three different things and we’ve collapsed them into one overwhelming pile. The narrowing process, digging into what actually matters and whittling it down to the one thing, has been freeing. Spoiler: it’s also helped me get more done.
We talk about this constantly with leaders and their strategic plans, pushing them toward radical clarity around the fewest possible objectives, because an organization can’t prioritize everything at once any more than a person can. Each leader, each department, gets to have their own singular priority. That’s what makes it useful.
But that’s not really what I’m sitting with today. What I keep noticing is how we’ve overburdened ourselves as individual humans with the idea that we can hold multiple priorities in a day, a week, a month, and that more priorities somehow mean we’re more important, more valued, more busy, more something. Insert whatever word works for you.
What it actually creates is more cognitive load, more dissonance, more suffering, because we take on too much and never fully complete anything before dragging ourselves to the next thing. We are living in a high-velocity, simultaneous era, and I think we have to learn to prune and find that ONE priority. Once you take that step, you get to move to the next one. But five priorities running concurrently isn’t really five priorities. It’s a wish list wearing a business suit. Multitasking was never a real thing, and neither is a week full of number-one priorities.
Since I started this practice of intense focus, I’m accomplishing more than I have in years. I’ve said this to leaders about annual strategic initiatives, and I’ll say it to you as an individual: what would happen if you got honest about the one thing that, if you did it today, would have a material impact on your day, your year, your business, whatever matters to you? When I ask myself that question, I can usually answer it fast. And if I get it done in the first hour, I get to ask again: what’s the next priority. What it FEELS like is success. Accomplishment. And that feeling fuels the next right thing.
This is part of the larger work of breaking down the systems we’ve been operating inside of, and giving ourselves more grace to simplify. Reducing to one priority doesn’t make you weak or less of a serious executive. I’d argue it’s the opposite. I am more effective now that I commit to my one thing and my goals for the day, which are never more than five.
It’s worth experimenting with. What if you named the one priority for today? What if you wrote three goals you’d let yourself feel proud of finishing? I know your plate is full and you’re moving fast and the big goals still need to get hit. But none of that happens unless you can be present enough to take the one next step that makes it possible.
Try it. Don’t just try it for a day. Try it for two weeks and notice what shifts.
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