When Everything Is Urgent: How Competing Priorities Destroy Focus, Energy, and Value

“If you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will.” — Greg McKeown

I was consulting with an organisation full of incredibly talented people — capable, committed, and working hard — but deeply misaligned.

• Sales were selling products that didn’t exist in order to hit targets.
• Marketing were promoting a launch with nothing concrete to launch.
• Product teams were scrambling to close out last year’s promises, nowhere near shipping the new product marketing had already announced.
• Operations were caught in the middle, supporting several versions of the same thing.
• Customer support were overwhelmed by the fallout.
• Professional services were training new customers on last year’s product, fully aware it would all change again in a few weeks.

Leaders and managers were pulling their hair out.

Everyone was busy.
Everyone was stretched.
Everyone was stressed.

This is the hidden cost of competing priorities.

It isn’t just inefficiency — it’s exhaustion.

My job was to bring clarity and alignment so the organisation could move from idea to value. Because while there was a lot of visible activity, very little of it was creating meaningful or financial return.

When Everything Matters Equally

Competing priorities don’t just slow delivery — they quietly erode trust and motivation.

In this organisation, every initiative being pushed into teams was labelled the highest priority. But when everything is the highest priority, nothing truly is.

People stopped believing the leadership team.
Teams began ignoring “urgent” requests — because everything was urgent.
Decisions stalled. Options stayed open.
Leaders and teams hedged their bets across multiple initiatives.
People protected their own corners.

Everyone was spread too thin, and as a result, nothing crossed the finish line.

This pattern is painfully common. Good ideas get funded and started — then stall in the middle, never quite making it to value. Costs rise. Revenue dips. Eventually, the conversation shifts from value creation to cost-cutting.

And all of it happens for a familiar reason:
too much work enters the system with too little prioritisation — combined with the belief that simply working harder will somehow resolve it.

👉 If you're interested in a simple way to start building a Portfolio Management system, this article may be helpful.

The symptoms are easy to spot:

• Duplication of effort — multiple teams unknowingly solving the same problem
• Context switching — endless partial work, little complete value
• Meetings multiplying — coordination as a substitute for clarity
• Governance boards appearing — an attempt to regain control that often accelerates its loss
• Slow decisions — no shared picture of what success actually looks like

Soon the organisation feels tired — not because people aren’t trying, but because they’re trying everything at once.

The Human Side of the System

Inside every delivery system lives a hidden portfolio of emotions:

• enthusiasm when a new initiative begins
• frustration when another interrupts
• quiet cynicism when old work is silently abandoned

The cost of poor alignment isn’t just measured in time or budget.
It’s measured in attention, trust, and energy.

I see this repeatedly in my consulting work.

The system doesn’t break because people don’t care.
It breaks because people care about too many things at once.

Eventually, frustration turns into apathy.

People stop putting their hands up because help never comes.
They stop trying to fix systemic problems leadership won’t help address.
They tire of seeing their best work stuck in limbo — never quite making it to value.
They grow confused, then detached.

This is why, in the Idea → Value system, investment comes before action.

You cannot move from idea to value until you decide where energy (and money) will flow.
When everything is funded — emotionally or financially — nothing gets finished.

Clarity Is an Act of Care

Leadership is often described in terms of vision and direction.

But at its heart, leadership is about care. Care is the fuel for creative action.
And clarity is one of its deepest expressions.

When people know what truly matters, they can:

• say no without guilt
• focus without fear
• rest without anxiety

Clarity leads to alignment — a shared understanding of what matters now, and what does not. Alignment leads to momentum. And momentum leads to value.

Alignment doesn’t create control.
It creates confidence.

It’s tempting for leaders to believe progress comes from doing more.

In reality, progress comes from focusing energy on the few things that genuinely move the system forward and lead to value.

Clarity protects human energy — and that is the finite resource most organisations squander first.

👉 See this post on Mottainai - the regret of wasting human resources

From Competing to Connected

So how do you realign when the noise has taken over?

Start small. Look for signals of overload — too many goals, too many meetings, too little visible progress, too much work, too much quiet disengagement — and begin with simple questions.

1. Name the true priorities

If you can’t clearly articulate the top three, you haven’t truly decided.

Rank them 1 to 3. What is number one? What follows?

The root of the word priority is singular — there was no plural form.
Ranking forces clarity, and clarity allows people to align time, energy, and attention toward what truly matters.

2. Map initiatives to outcomes (value)

What is this work actually for?

Which strategic goal or customer outcome does it support?

Is it creating:

• financial value (revenue)?
• cost reduction (efficiency)?
• enablement value (keeping the business operating)?
• learning value (experimentation)?

Draw a clean, simple line between idea → investment → action → value.

3. Audit energy, not just budget

Where are people spending their best attention?
What’s draining them without driving value?

4. Simplify cadence

Align teams around shared rhythms — quarterly goals, monthly demos, weekly focus reviews — so everyone moves to the same beat.

5. Create learning space

Replace one status meeting each month with a reflection session:

• What’s helping us?
• What’s hindering us?
• What have we learned?

Small rituals like these turn alignment from an abstract concept into a lived behaviour.

What Alignment Feels Like

When work is aligned, everything feels lighter.

Fewer meetings.
Faster decisions.
Calmer people.

Energy begins to flow in one direction again.

People do their best work — not because they’re pushed, but because the system finally allows it.

That’s the shift from competing to connected:
from overlapping effort to shared momentum,
from constant pressure to purposeful progress.

Closing Reflection

At Cultivated, we say that systems are only as healthy as the people within them.

If people are exhausted, distracted, or frustrated, the system isn’t agile — it’s anxious.

Alignment isn’t just a strategic exercise.
It’s a human one.

When we design systems that focus energy, we don’t just improve delivery — we make work more sustainable, more meaningful, and more alive.

Idea → Investment → Action → Value

Because the most valuable systems don’t just create outcomes —
they protect the people who create them.

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