When everything is important, nothing is. Learn why having multiple priorities isn't the problem—it's having priorities that conflict.

tl;dr. Organizations struggle with competing priorities. Success comes not from trying to prioritize everything, but from ensuring your chosen priorities can peacefully coexist.

For 600 years, we had one word to describe the first thing that needed to be done: priority. Then, during World War II, someone decided we needed a plural version. Seventy years later, we’re drowning in ‘priorities’ while productivity experts beg us to focus on just one thing at a time.

The irony would be delicious if it weren’t so costly to modern business.

The CEO of a manufacturing company I worked with proudly shared their three strategic priorities: increase efficiency, drive innovation, and improve quality. When I pointed out that these goals fundamentally conflict with each other, he initially struggled to even imagine deprioritizing any of them.

As his organization was to discover, true innovation requires accepting some inefficiency, and quality demands time that could be spent elsewhere. The problem isn’t having multiple priorities—it’s having priorities that work against each other.

When Everything is Important, Nothing Is

Consider a typical software development company. The engineering department prioritizes code quality and technical debt reduction. Marketing prioritizes rapid feature releases. Sales prioritizes custom solutions for major clients. Each priority is valid in isolation—but together they create a perfect storm of competing demands.

This isn’t just an organizational problem—it’s baked into our language. We’ve normalized the idea of having multiple “top priorities,” without considering whether these priorities can coexist.

The Zero-Sum Game of Attention

Here’s what makes this particularly challenging: attention and resources are finite. When a company claims to prioritize everything, they’re really just avoiding the hard work of making tough choices.

I’ve seen this play out countless times. A design agency I worked with wanted to prioritize both custom client work and developing their own products. The result? Mediocre performance in both areas because these priorities required fundamentally different organizational structures and workflows.

Aligning Your Priorities

While it’s unrealistic for most organizations to have a single priority, the key is ensuring your priorities work in harmony rather than opposition.

For example, a software company might prioritize both customer satisfaction and code quality—these priorities reinforce each other. But if they also prioritize rapid feature releases, they’ve created internal conflict that will strain the organization.

The manufacturing company I mentioned earlier? They eventually reduced their priorities to two complementary goals: innovation in specific product lines while maintaining efficiency in their established products. This let them partition their resources effectively instead of forcing every department to juggle competing demands.

The Way Forward

If you’re struggling with priorities, you’re actually struggling with deprioritization. Try this exercise: list all your current priorities, then force yourself to remove half of them. The discomfort you feel during this process is the exact reason it’s valuable. For the priorities that remain, verify that they don’t fundamentally conflict with each other.

One tool I’ve found invaluable for this process is the Eisenhower Matrix—a simple but powerful framework for evaluating priorities based on their urgency and importance. I’ve written about this extensively before, but the key insight is that many things that feel urgent aren’t actually important, and many important things never feel urgent enough to prioritize. Using this matrix to sort your priorities often reveals that several “critical” items aren’t priorities at all—they’re just making noise.

The most successful organizations I’ve worked with don’t try to prioritize everything—they make conscious choices about what matters most and what can wait. More importantly, they ensure their chosen priorities can peacefully coexist.

Remember: the word “priority” was singular for 600 years for a reason. While we may need multiple priorities in today’s complex business environment, they should be few enough and aligned enough to actually drive progress rather than internal conflict.