When everything is Priority

Posted on October 08, 2025 by Diane Nelson, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.

You’re in the middle of the hourglass.

Sand is pouring in from the top, senior leadership’s strategic initiatives, urgent customer escalations, board requests, organizational changes that need immediate attention. Sand is also pressing up from the bottom, your team members have questions and need your guidance, approvals, resources, and your presence. And you? You’re the narrow point in the middle where everything flow through, and sometimes…. gets stuck.

I remember this feeling viscerally. I’d sit down to work on strategic planning, the kind of thinking work that actually moved the needle, and within minutes, I’d notice an email from a customer that felt urgent. Then I’d glance at my calendar and realize I had a meeting in an hour that I hadn’t prepared for. My stomach would tighten. Each task screamed for attention. Each one felt both urgent and important. No matter what I chose to work on, meant actively abandoning something else, watching it slip further behind schedule.

At any given moment, you’re facing conflicting directives from different stakeholders, urgent operational fires competing with important strategic work, and the impossible math of fitting twenty hours of “must-do” work into an eight-hour day. When everything is labeled Priority #1, nothing actually is. But try explaining that to the five people who each believe their urgent need should come first.

Mindset Phase: The Hyper-Achiever Saboteur
Let’s talk about the voice in your head that keeps you stuck in this mess. I call it the hyper-achiever saboteur, and if you’re a mid-level manager, you probably know it well. This is the internal voice that insists you need to do it all, excel at everything, and never let anyone down.

Here’s the cruel trick this voice plays: even when you do complete a task, even when you accomplish something significant, it’s never enough. There’s always the next thing, and the next, and the next. Satisfaction becomes illusive, always just out of reach, because the moment you finish one priority, three more have taken its place.

The hyper-achiever saboteur operates from several toxic beliefs:

“Saying no means I’m failing.” You believe that a good manager should be able to handle everything thrown at them. Pushing back on priorities feels like admitting weakness or incompetence. So you say yes to everything and then slowly drown in the commitments you’ve made.

“If I don’t do it all, I’m not valuable.” Your worth feels tied to your capacity to juggle multiple demands simultaneously. You’ve confused being busy with being effective and being overwhelmed with being important.
“Someone else gets to decide what’s priority.” You’ve abdicated the responsibility of prioritization to whoever is loudest, most persistent, or highest in the organizational hierarchy. You’ve become reactive rather than strategic, letting urgency dictate your days instead of importance.

“I can’t let go of anything.” Even when you know something shouldn’t be on your plate, you hold onto it. Maybe because you’re afraid it won’t get done right. Maybe because you’re afraid of what it means if you’re not needed for everything. Either way, you’re clutching too many balls in the air and at risk of dropping them all.

The healthier mindset? You cannot serve everyone and everything equally. Your job is to make strategic choices about where your unique leadership creates the most impact, and to consciously, intentionally let go of the rest. This isn’t failure. This is leadership.

Skillset Phase: Strategic Ruthlessness in Priority Management
Once you’ve recognized that you can’t do everything, you need practical approaches to decide what actually deserves your attention and what doesn’t.

Create a Personal Priority Filter
Develop your own clear criteria for what constitutes a genuine priority. This might include questions like: Does this align with our top three organizational goals? Am I uniquely positioned to handle this, or could someone else do it? What happens if this doesn’t get done today, this week, this month? Will it matter in six months? Your filter won’t eliminate all competing demands, but it will give you a framework for making consistent decisions rather than reacting emotionally to whoever is pressing hardest in the moment.

Practice Saying…. No
Saying no doesn’t have to mean burning bridges or appearing uncooperative. It means being honest about capacity and trade-offs. Try: “I can take this on, but it means Project X will be delayed by two weeks. Which is more important right now?” or “I’m at capacity, but here’s who might be able to help with this.” When you make the trade-offs visible, you’re not refusing to help, you’re forcing a real prioritization conversation.

Distinguish Between Urgent and Important
Most of what feels urgent isn’t actually important, and most of what’s important doesn’t feel urgent until it’s too late. Block time for important work before urgent demands fill your calendar. Treat strategic thinking time and planning sessions as unmovable appointments. The urgent will always find you; the important requires you to be intentional.

Delegate Decision-Making, Not Just Tasks
Stop being the bottleneck for every decision. Give your team members the authority to make calls on routine matters without running them by you first. Establish clear decision-making frameworks so people know when they need your input and when they can move forward independently. Your job isn’t to approve everything; it’s to ensure the right decisions get made.

Batch and Theme Your Days
Instead of switching between strategic work, team support, and stakeholder management all day long, dedicate chunks of time or entire days to specific types of work. Maybe Mondays are for strategic planning, Tuesday mornings for team one-on-ones, Wednesday afternoons for customer issues. When you reduce context-switching, you increase both the quality of your work and your sense of control.

Let Go Visibly and Completely
When you decide something isn’t your priority, don’t half-abandon it. Either delegate it fully with the resources and authority to succeed or communicate clearly that it’s not happening right now. The worst thing you can do is keep something on your mental list while giving it no actual attention. That’s how you end up with fifty things in perpetual “almost done” limbo.

Matchset (Accountability) Phase: Staying True to Your Priorities
Changing your relationship with competing priorities requires ongoing accountability, because your default patterns are deeply ingrained and the external pressure isn’t going away.

Weekly Priority Audit
Every Friday or Monday, review your calendar and task list from the previous week. How much time did you spend on your stated top priorities versus everything else? Track the gap between your intended focus and your actual focus. This simple awareness often reveals patterns you didn’t know existed, like realizing you haven’t spent any time on strategic planning in three weeks despite claiming it’s a priority.

Peer Accountability Partnerships
Find another manager who struggles with similar challenges. Check in weekly to discuss: What did you say no to this week? What important work did you protect time for? Where did you get pulled off track? Having someone else witness your commitments makes you more likely to follow through, and hearing their struggles reminds you you’re not alone in this.

Regular Stakeholder Alignment
Meet with your manager quarterly to explicitly discuss priorities. Don’t assume you’re aligned, ask directly: “If I can only accomplish three major things this quarter, what should they be?” Then use that conversation as ammunition when other demands arise. “I’d love to take that on, but it conflicts with the priorities we agreed on. Should we revisit those priorities, or should this wait?”

Team Transparency
Be honest with your team about your competing priorities and the choices you’re making. When you model strategic prioritization, you give them permission to do the same. Let them see you decline requests, defer less important work, and focus your energy intentionally. This transparency also helps them understand why you’re not always immediately available, it’s not that you don’t care; it’s that you’re being strategic about impact.

Celebrate Completion, Not Just Progress
Work with a mentor, coach, or trusted colleague who can help you recognize what you’ve actually accomplished. The hyper-achiever saboteur will always minimize your wins and fixate on what’s left undone. You need someone who can stop you and say, “Look at what you’ve achieved. That’s significant.” Build in regular moments to acknowledge completion before rushing to the next thing.

Monthly “Let Go” Review
Once a month, explicitly list what you’re choosing not to do or to stop doing. Write it down. Share it with someone. There’s power in making the decision to let go concrete and visible rather than letting it remain a vague, guilt-inducing background noise.

Here’s Your Mission…should you choose to accept it!
Right now, before you do anything else, write down every project, task, and responsibility currently on your plate that feels like a priority. Get it all out of your head and onto paper.

Now comes the hard part: Force rank them. Not into tiers or categories, into a single numbered list from most important to least important. No ties allowed. This exercise will be uncomfortable because it forces you to make the trade-offs you’ve been avoiding.

Once you have your list, draw a line after the top three items. Everything above the line gets your proactive attention. Everything below the line either gets delegated, deferred, or consciously dropped. If someone else disagrees with your prioritization, that’s a gift, it means you get to have a real conversation about trade-offs instead of pretending you can do everything.

Your time and energy are finite resources. Your impact doesn’t have to be. Stop trying to be everything to everyone and start being strategic about where you matter most. That’s not selfishness or laziness. That’s leadership.