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Continuous and ruthless prioritisation

🕒 There will never be enough time. Somehow, we have made peace with this in our personal lives: we reprioritize our to dos daily, when something more important or an unexpected problem comes in. We create bucket lists for the long term, and over the years we cross off, add, and shift things around.


Move to the workplace and things differ: the delusion that ever-growing workloads can somehow be completed without trade-offs seems predominant. Just add it on top, and find a way to get it done.


Let’s admit it: workloads are in constant motion, and even with additional resources or budget, there will ALWAYS be more to do than can be done. Once we accept this, the solution unfolds quickly and unequivocally: continuous and ruthless prioritisation. This takes a bit of effort: re-look at the workload - whether daily actions, projects, or large strategic initiatives - with regular cadence, re-assess the alignment to overall business goals, re-evaluate in comparison to each other, and say more often "Yes we could do this, but what will we deprioritize?". Then compare to the capacity available to make our collective commitments.


I know it sounds basic, yet it remains one of the most challenging practices to implement across organizational levels.


(Note: Lean and Agile methodologies offer useful approaches supporting dynamic prioritization, including relative comparison, value-based assessment, and work visualisation, but these are topics for another discussion 🙂)


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