The 19 Priorities Problem: Teams Stall When They Try to do It All

One team lead had 19 priorities for the Quarter. Nineteen. Even after trimming to 10, it still wasn’t manageable.

A conversation with a VP earlier this week highlighted a pattern I've seen before: when everything is a priority, nothing is.

In a previous piece, I unpacked false urgency—the illusion of progress that masks a lack of strategic traction. That VP's story brought those ideas into sharper focus.

What Happens When Urgency Outpaces Capacity

The company was under pressure. Revenue was declining. Leadership wanted faster execution and better alignment. OKRs were shared across the org to unify direction, but instead they created traffic.

Everyone aligned on paper. But in practice, teams were overwhelmed, drowning in cross-functional initiatives without clear trade-offs. Teams weren’t misaligned—they were overloaded.

This wasn’t just a prioritization problem. It was a breakdown in how decisions were made, how work was scoped, and how capacity was surfaced.

What Can You Afford NOT to Do?

Change came from a shift in question: instead of "what should we take on," the team started asking, "what can we afford not to do?"

Quarterly planning became a decision-making engine:

• Initiatives were ranked—from most essential to least
• Each one was labeled as committed (must-do) or aspirational (only if there’s room)
• Accountability was clarified at every level—from objectives to initiatives
• Capacity was reviewed before work began, not after things broke

The planning artifact was simple: a shared spreadsheet. But it became a living tool for managing focus, pressure-testing decisions, and handling mid-quarter requests.

Focus as a System

The shift didn’t create perfection. Not all top priorities moved forward. But now there was visibility. Teams knew where the work stood, what was delayed, and why.

The planning rhythm became a circuit-breaker for false urgency.

When new requests emerged, teams didn’t scramble. They re-ranked. They deferred. They made trade-offs visible.

Before The Next Strategy Meeting

If you suspect your team is working hard but not moving forward, try this four-step audit:

1. Count the load per leader. How many initiatives is each person accountable for?
2. Rank the work. Top to bottom. No ties.
3. Tag each one: Committed or Aspirational. Make the categories mean something.
4. Review trade-offs. If a new ask shows up, what gets dropped or delayed?

Focus isn’t a slogan. It’s a system.

If you want to escape false urgency, stop celebrating activity. Start creating clarity—and structure that protects it.