Priorities, plural

I’ve been reading a lot about choice these days.  Choice is of paramount importance for anyone involved with hiring a human workforce (leaders, managers, recruiters, the job seekers themselves).

Employees have the choice of staying at a job or they may choose to leave.  If they choose to leave, they have abundant choices in the job search: what type of job to pursue, which offer to accept, how much to negotiate.  Employers also have choices when launching a search and in who they ultimately hire.  I spend a lot of time on that end professionally, and it’s a fascinating scene.

The topic is also of interest to me personally as I consider my own choices – those that have brought me to where I am now and those which could have taken me down countless other paths.  The choices I will make in the future.  Even the choice of what I’m going to select from the Shady Maple Smorgasbord for breakfast this weekend.  (You really can’t go wrong, but I live 30min from the largest buffet in the United States and still ponder my choices every time.)

As we consider how people make choices, the word “priorities” will inevitably pop up.  At the end of the day, most choices are made after various – and sometimes competing – priorities are weighed.

This idea of “priorities” is a modern one, though.  In fact, the word didn’t exist until about a century ago.

“Priority” did.  That word first came into use in the 14th century.  But the plural form of the word, as we use it today, did not exist until the 1900s.

As Greg McKeown writes in Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, the root of the word “priority” is singular and, up until recently, could only be singular.  It was, by definition, the ONE thing that takes precedence.  The one thing that is prior to all other things.  (Other authors have touched on this as well including Gary Keller in The ONE Thing and Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice.)

Today, we have a ton of “priorities,” thus watering down any from being a true “priority” in our life.  If everything is important, then nothing is important.

I was reminded of this the other day when I watched a snippet of an interview Simon Sinek did with author and consultant Juliet Funt.

(Simon Sinek is my answer to “who, living or dead, would you like to have dinner with”, by the way.  And that was not a difficult choice.)

Juliet noted that there’s a trap many leaders fall into when trying to improve work culture.  That is the tendency to focus on prioritization instead of reduction.  In other words, believing the answer to a culture of overwork and overwhelm is to rank a list of things to do in a nice 1-10 order instead of reducing number of items on the list to begin with.

The idea of plural “priorities” backfires in those situations, and it might go back to the root of the word centuries ago.  Humans struggle with lists of priorities, and when the list is long, everything gets watered down until nothing is important.  Certainly not important enough to guide choices with any amount of confidence.

Could this be why we sometimes feel like we’ve missed out on things happening right in front of us?  We may have physically been there at the family party, but our mind was somewhere else, focused on another item on the priorities list.  At the end of the day, the opportunity for creating that memory is in the past, lingering only as a fuzzy recollection that “yeah, there was a cake. I can’t remember what flavor.”

If reduction is the goal, but we still live complex lives, perhaps we focus on reducing to a single priority for just this day, just this hour, just this moment.  The rest of the list will still be there when we come back.