Stop Calling Everything Urgent

A few years ago, I joined a company as operations director and inherited a project board with 47 tasks labeled "Urgent" or "High Priority."

Forty-seven.

The team was working 50-hour weeks, constantly firefighting, and somehow still missing deadlines. Morale was terrible. When I asked why everything was urgent, the answer was some variation of "because it is" or "because the client said so" or just a shrug.

This is a story about how we fixed it. Spoiler: it wasn't a tool change or a new framework. It was a mindset shift—and one specific rule that changed everything.

The Urgency Trap

Here's what happens when you let urgency labels run wild:

This is a tragedy of the commons, played out in task management. No individual is wrong—they're rationally responding to a broken system. But collectively, you end up with a board where everything screams for attention and nothing gets prioritized.

The First (Failed) Attempt

My first idea was to define priority levels clearly. We created a rubric:

Within two weeks, 80% of tasks were "Critical" or "High." People just mapped their old urgency labels to the new system. The rubric was technically correct—everyone could justify why their task met the criteria. But it didn't solve anything.

The Rule That Actually Worked

After some trial and error, we implemented a simple constraint:

That's it. Three. If you want to add a fourth, you have to demote one of the existing three.

The first week was painful. People had to make actual choices. "Is fixing this bug really more important than finishing that feature?" "Which client's request actually can't wait?"

But something interesting happened: the conversations improved. Instead of everything being abstractly "important," people had to articulate why something deserved one of the precious three slots. And when they couldn't articulate it clearly, the task got demoted.

The Downstream Effects

How We Implemented It

We created a dedicated "This Week's Top 3" lane at the top of our board. Only three cards could live there at a time. The board literally wouldn't let you add a fourth (we used automation to enforce this).

Every Monday, we'd have a quick sync to decide what deserved those slots. Every Friday, we'd review: did we finish them? If not, why not? If yes, what's next?

The constraint forced clarity. And clarity, it turns out, is more valuable than flexibility.

The Hard Part

This approach requires something uncomfortable: admitting that you can't do everything. That some things will have to wait. That some things might never get done at all.

For chronic over-committers (like me, honestly), this feels like failure. But it's actually just reality. You were never going to do all 47 "urgent" things. The only question is whether you acknowledge that explicitly or let it happen chaotically.

Is This Approach Right for You?

But if you looked at your board right now and more than 20% of tasks are marked "urgent" or "high priority"—you probably have a priority problem. And the solution isn't better labels. It's fewer priorities.