Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor

Great article on prioritization, and the friction that generates when people don’t understand the most important tenet of prioritization:

Time is a zero-sum resource: An hour spent on one thing necessarily means not spending an hour on the entire universe of alternative things

There are always more things to be done than time to do them. Hence, in order to do The Most Important Thing, we need to say no to everything else (or at least, not yet).

There will always people on the organization that will disagree, and in my opinion, the biggest divide is about time horizons.

Some people work with shorter time horizons: they are just more aware than not being alive next month is more important than not being alive next year, and an accumulation of failed strategic initiatives have made more cynical.

This pisses off long term thinkers. Which feel trapped in a local minimum and feel the organization is constantly chasing opportunities and not being strategic.

So, the problem with ruthless prioritization is that no one really knows where that 10x level is. Short term and long term thinkers have different risk profiles and will chase different directions.

Great companies do both. Willingly or accidentally, they allocate most resources to short term initiatives, while leaving some percentage to chase long shots. I think this is another form of slack, which is what allows complex organisms to find global maxima.