Your "Priorities" are a Lie

Once upon a time, there was a business owner who kept a list.

Not just any list, a “priorities list”.

It had seventeen items on it, each one marked "HIGH PRIORITY" in bold, red letters.

Customer retention was priority #1.

New product development was priority #2.

Cost reduction was priority #3.

Marketing was priority #4.

And on and on it went.

Every day, this business owner would stare at that list, feeling overwhelmed.

They'd bounce between priorities like a pinball, making small progress on everything and real progress on nothing.

By 3 PM, they'd accomplished bits and pieces but couldn't point to anything meaningful they'd actually finished.

Until one day, something clicked.

They realized the word "priorities" was a lie. A grammatical impossibility. The word "priority" came from the Latin "prior," meaning "first."

You can't have multiple firsts. You can't have seventeen #1s. It's like saying you have multiple "onlys" or several "mosts."

It makes no sense!

Because of that realization, they did something radical: they crossed out sixteen items on their list. It hurt. Each crossed-out line felt like abandoning something important. But here's what they learned:

PRIORITIZATION MUST BE PAINFUL.

It has to hurt. If choosing your one priority feels easy and comfortable, you're not really prioritizing…

They kept one thing, just one, at the top. Everything else got shoved into a "someday/maybe" pile.

Because of that singular focus, something magical happened. Instead of spending twenty minutes here and thirty minutes there, they spent three uninterrupted hours on the one thing that mattered most. They made real progress. They solved actual problems. They moved the needle instead of just spinning their wheels.

Because of that momentum, they finished what they started. And when they finished, they felt something they hadn't experienced in months: the satisfaction of completion. No half-done projects haunting them. No mental juggling act. Just one thing, done well, launched, and working.

Until finally, they adopted a new rule: One priority at a time.

When someone came to them with an "urgent" request, they'd ask: "Is this more important than what I'm working on right now?" If yes, they'd switch. If no, it went to the someday/maybe pile. Simple. Binary. No gray area.

Ever since then, their business transformed. Projects got finished faster. Quality improved because attention wasn't divided. Stress decreased because they weren't constantly context-switching between seventeen different "top priorities." Their team followed suit, abandoning their own laundry lists of urgent tasks for focused, predefined work.

Here's the truth most business owners won't admit: when everything is a priority, nothing is.

The word "priorities" has become business-speak for "I can't make decisions."

It's a way to avoid the hard work of choosing.

But choosing is your job as a leader.

Not choosing is also a choice!

Try this tomorrow: pick one thing. Not three. Not five. One. Work on it until it's done. Then pick the next one thing. You'll get more done by noon than you used to accomplish in a week.

Stop having priorities.

Start having A PRIORITY.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon