How to Decide What Takes Priority

Technical skills determine whether work can be done; workplace soft skills help determine whether it succeeds. This workplace series draws on my experiences and the reflections they prompted.

I often hear people around me make complaints like these:

• Why do business requests never end, and why do they keep multiplying and becoming more urgent?
• Why are we always putting out fires?
• Why have we not started the plan we made at the beginning of the year, even after six months?
• We are always driven by other people’s demands.

This is bad for the team, individuals, and the businesses they serve. It may be understandable early in a business’s development or under unusual circumstances, but if it persists, something is wrong. Today I want to discuss how a team lead can determine priorities.

The Four-Quadrant Framework

The familiar four-quadrant framework below gives us two useful dimensions: urgency and importance.

In theory, we simply classify each task by urgency and importance, then assign priorities:

• Important and urgent: High priority.
• Neither urgent nor important: Low priority.
• Urgent but unimportant, or important but not urgent: Medium priority (though we prefer to work on important things).

Common Mistakes

There are two broad categories:

• Misjudging the nature of the work, giving it the wrong urgency or importance.
• Misjudging how it will develop, failing to see that its nature may change over time.

Examples:

• Misjudging urgency: Treating a request as urgent because the requesting business team is forceful.
• Misjudging importance: Insufficient research and overgeneralization turn a small need into an apparently major requirement.
• Missing future developments: Failing to anticipate maintenance costs as an infrastructure service scales, delaying effective operations tools, and filling the gap with manual effort.
• ….

What Makes Something Important or Urgent?

Important work aligns with the team’s direction and goals at its current stage. Its importance depends on how much it contributes to the long-term goals appropriate to that stage.

For infrastructure teams, early work often supports business requirements and helps users adopt foundational software. At an intermediate stage, deeper use-case understanding and performance optimization broaden its reach, strengthen technical capabilities for existing users, and attract more teams. At maturity, stability dominates: meet the SLA, earn complete user trust, and become the company’s standard solution for a particular scenario.

Urgent work is work that can fundamentally affect the team and its direction in the short term.

This includes effects on influence and long-term interests, such as losing a flagship customer in an industry or damaging the team’s credibility. Judge urgency from the team’s perspective while aiming to maximize overall benefit, avoiding both selfishness and unconditional compliance. For an infrastructure team, judging solely from the requester’s perspective would make most reported problems urgent, which is clearly unsuitable.

What Should We Do?

Clarify Long-Term Goals for the Current Stage

Clear long-term goals are a prerequisite for judging importance. They must be well considered, specific, aligned across levels, and stable rather than easily changed.

Consider an infrastructure team like mine:

Early on, a team accepts almost every business request to support diverse use cases, creating numerous APIs and modules. As adoption and usage grow, these become an operational burden. Each iteration becomes harder than the last. Eventually, doing more creates more mistakes, and the team works harder while producing less.

If this continues, problems grow in proportion to business scale, leading to one of two outcomes: growth stalls, or operations cannot keep up. Supporting requests was important during the early stage, but later goals should focus on improving the system for existing users and businesses, including system-wide refactoring, reducing operational pressure, and establishing standards.

Take a Step Back

I often see less experienced colleagues rush straight into execution, overlooking time cost and return on effort. With a little thought, most work turns out to be less urgent than it first appeared. More often, the task is to balance several teams’ interests. Many things need not happen today or even this week. Taking more time to find a better solution can benefit the team, partners, and business while strengthening mutual trust and influence.

From my team’s perspective, I often ask:

• What problem is this request trying to solve, and what is the best solution?
• What changes if we do it today, next week, or next month?
• Can the work be split to minimize what must be rushed?
• For a collaborative project, does it affect other teams’ schedules?
• Does it affect our credibility and influence with the affected business?
• ….

Think Long Term

Work can move between the four quadrants over time:

• Neither urgent nor important can become urgent but unimportant.
• Important but not urgent can become both important and urgent.
• Urgent but unimportant can become both important and urgent under conditions such as increasing feedback.
• Neither urgent nor important can become important but not urgent as feedback grows.

Long-term thinking means making a reasonable decision now in light of possible future developments. Consider a common project-management mistake:

Many teams assign P0, P1, and P2 priorities during sprint planning. P0 and P1 demand immediate attention, so P2 tasks accumulate. Those problems are real: leaving them unscheduled does not make them disappear. As feedback and scale increase, accumulated small problems can become a qualitative change. Failing to recognize and contain the risk leaves a team constantly fighting fires and unable to keep things under control.

A few suggestions for managing work:

1. When deciding not to do something today, consider whether it will be necessary later and what form it will take.
2. Regularly review outstanding problems, group similar issues, and intervene early when a pattern threatens to escalate.
3. When the team is constantly fighting fires, reflect on the cause and work promptly to escape that situation.