You sit down at your desk, ready to start the day.
You’ve got six priority tasks lined up from last week.
Just as you’re about to dive in, the notifications hit.
Three people have shared messages about “urgent things” that need to be considered.
Two have been sent to over a dozen team members in a desperate plea for help. One is sent directly to you, although you think the sender could have made more progress first.
You ignore the team-wide messages and fire back a “Can this wait? Or can you progress without me?” to the DM.
Back to your list. You scan last week’s notes, waiting for the lightbulb to go on so you can make progress. It takes ten minutes, but soon you’re ready to go.
Then you’re interrupted again. This time, it’s a genuinely critical issue. The whole team starts throwing their thoughts into a shared chat channel.
You wait, reading all the messages, hoping that somebody will take ownership. But the usual ping arrives from the PM – “Can you take a look?”
It’s tiring. Demoralising even. All the switching between tasks, day after day, slowly wears you down.
So why does this keep happening?
Mostly, it’s because teams rarely have a clear, shared way to decide what matters most.
Add in modern chat tools that make it easy for anyone to grab your attention. Often, everyone’s busy without actually getting much done.
But there are different ways of working. Different approaches.
What if the team had a trusted way to decide what’s important?
That might look like:
- Team-level priorities that guide everyone, rather than task lists split by individual
- No individual assignment of tasks by PMs – team members commit based on skills, context, and availability
- A shared board highlighting what’s in progress, what’s blocked, and what’s next
- A simple rule for what to do when new work appears (e.g. triage, delay, or swap in with agreement)
- Clear expectations about who makes final calls when there’s a clash
Everything would be easier to see. You could get on with it without constant interruptions.
There are specific members of the team who triage real emergencies and only get others involved when they’ve made all the progress they reasonably can.
People respect each other’s limits. And there’s real time to focus.
Work improves. Progress feels steady. The pace is calm and sustainable.
That’s what good prioritisation makes possible.
I help agency teams build better prioritisation habits. Curious? Take a look at my approach to agency delivery.