Each weekday morning, I record a short audio reflection on leadership, performance, relationships, values, and what it means to show up well for the people and things that matter most.
It's five intentional minutes before the world starts asking things of you.
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Your calendar is packed, the deadline is closing in, a customer problem just exploded, and your 90-day “rock” is already behind. The uncomfortable truth is that most of us aren’t choosing between important and unimportant. We’re choosing between important and important, and those decisions quietly determine what your team actually ships, fixes, and improves.
We dig into what prioritization really means at work: not naming what matters, but deciding what gets your time and energy when two things that matter collide. We connect the dots between organizational priorities, team goals, and individual rocks, and why they must coexist with the everyday work that keeps the business running. We also unpack goal conflict research and the simple reason it feels impossible sometimes: new initiatives don’t come with new hours or extra attention.
Then we run a practical “2:15 PM test” you can use with your team. Three hours left, a meeting in 15 minutes, a 4:00 deadline, an urgent email, a customer issue, and strategic work waiting. What wins, and why? If the answer isn’t clear, we explain how guesswork starts driving the organization, and what better priorities should provide: direction in the moment, with room for judgment when reality changes.
If you want clearer decision-making, better focus, and less thrash, subscribe, share this with a leader or teammate, and leave a review with the trade-off your team struggles with most.
Good morning. Here's the time and energy morning brief for Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. Five intentional minutes before the world starts asking things of us. At its simplest, a rock is a way of saying of all the things we could work on over the next 90 days, these are the things that deserve our attention.
That sounds pretty straightforward until Wednesday afternoon. Because that's when a customer needs something. A deadline is approaching, your calendar is full, somebody needs a decision, the rock you're responsible for is behind. And three other things legitimately need to get done. The problem usually isn't deciding between something important and something unimportant. It's deciding between important and important. That's a much harder decision.
Yesterday we talked about how the things we measure help teach people where to spend their time and energy. Priorities do the same thing. Organizations have strategic priorities, teams have goals, individuals have rocks, and then all of those priorities have to coexist with the normal work required to keep the business running. Customer experience matters, growth matters, quality matters, efficiency matters, culture matters. Taking care of our people matters. They're all important. But at some point, important things compete. And when they do, have we made it clear which one should win? I think that's one of the harder parts of prioritization. Prioritization isn't deciding what's important. Plenty of things are important. Prioritization is deciding what gets our energy when important things compete.
There's some interesting research behind why this can be difficult. Researchers have studied what happens when people pursue multiple goals at the same time. One consistent challenge is goal conflict. Progress toward one goal can make progress toward another more difficult because both are competing for limited resources like time, attention, and effort, which sounds remarkably similar to a normal workday. We don't suddenly receive more hours because leadership introduced another strategic priority. Our teams don't get an additional supply of attention because a new initiative matters. The time still has to come from somewhere. The energy does too. That's where organizational priorities become more than something we put on a planning document. They have to help people make decisions.
Imagine someone on your team at 2.15 this afternoon. They have three hours left in the day. A customer problem needs attention. Their rock is behind. They have a meeting in 15 minutes. There's a deadline at four, and an email just arrived marked urgent. What should they do? That's not really a hypothetical leadership question. People make versions of that decision all day long. And if we haven't created enough understanding about what matters most, they'll still make a decision. They just have to make it on their own. Sometimes they'll choose correctly, sometimes they'll choose whatever is loudest. Sometimes they'll choose whatever is easiest to finish. Sometimes they'll choose whatever they believe their leader is most likely to ask about tomorrow. And sometimes they'll try to do all of it at once. That's an awful lot of organizational energy being directed by
guesswork. I don't think the answer is creating a perfect hierarchy for every possible decision. Work isn't that clean. Things change. Judgment matters. Sometimes the customer problem really should blow up the entire afternoon, but people should understand enough about what matters to make a thoughtful choice when priorities collide. That's part of what good priorities should give us, not just a list of important things, direction when important things compete.
So here's something worth considering today. Think about the people you lead, or even just your own work. When two important things compete for time and energy, is it clear which one should win? If you're not sure, the people making that decision may not be sure either. And that might be worth a conversation. Because a priority isn't simply something we've told people matters, it's something we've helped them choose when other things matter too.
