The Priority Filter — Practitioner Experience

Practice: The Priority Filter

Pick your top 3 priorities. Let them be the filter for what you say yes to.

The Hook

Recency is not urgency. Protect your most important work before the interruptions decide for you.

DefaultBehavior SpectrumEmbedded

Signal

When does this matter?

The moment you feel your attention abandoning committed work before you've decided it should.

It's Monday morning. A new request has landed in your inbox, and you feel the pull to chase it.

Redirect

What do I do?

Prioritize and name your three deliverables. Keep them visible. Each time something new arrives, ask if the new request is truly more important than one of these three.

You review your week and name your top 3 workstreams — keeping them visible. New request? You ask: is this new request more important than any of these three?

Shift

How will I know it's working?

You start noticing how often recency was masquerading as urgency. New requests stop automatically overriding your named commitments, which now complete more consistently.

You start to see that new requests are not all priorities. Your named 3 become your litmus test for where you direct your attention.

Embedded

How do I know it worked?

Others notice you do less scrambling and have cleaner follow-through. Your attention actually matches what you said mattered.

You feel more organized and in control of your work. Stakeholders see progress being made on what you prioritized.

↺ Repeat until Embedded

Before (Old Pattern)

After (Embedded)

Lack of priorities. No named priorities to weigh a new request against.
You tend to focus on the newest requests. Recency, not importance, decides what gets attention.

"My top 3 priorities this week." Priorities are named and visible.
New requests are measured against the named ones.

The Goal

To consistently spot recency dressed up as urgency.

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