Is priority dilution sabotaging your success at work?

There is little doubt you’ve heard of procrastination. After all, one 2019 study found that 88% of the workforce tends to procrastinate for at least one hour a day.

It’s just so easy to procrastinate: messaging apps like Slack, with its signature “Knock Brush” sound, disturb our concentration all through the day as multiple messages land. Our phones and fitness trackers waylay us also, and there’s certainly no point in starting a new task when you’ve got a video call in 15 minutes, is there?

But why do we do it in the first place? There are many reasons, and they can include that paralysing feeling when you are trying to pursue perfection. It’s nearly easier to never start. Employees may also be afraid they’ll mess up––a great deterrent––or are just badly organised when it comes to time management.

Then there is the rise of “quiet quitting”, a recent workplace trend rooted in a lack of engagement that’s all about doing the bare minimum. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?

It’s all very familiar stuff to anyone who has ever held down a job. But leadership speaker and author Rory Vaden has identified a subtler form of procrastination he calls “Priority Dilution”. Similar to the classic procrastination we all know, this happens when “you delay the day’s most important tasks by allowing your attention to shift to less important but perhaps more urgent activities”.

Vaden’s term borrows from a phenomenon that occurs in multi-tasking computer systems, where a low priority task is repeatedly delayed in favour of higher priority tasks. This can result in suboptimal performance, and in some cases, complete starvation of the low-priority task.

The same thing happens at work.

You may have started off your morning with a list of jobs and responsibilities to tackle that day. But then the emails and Slack messages start to arrive: one project needs an update, another client needs an urgent and unscheduled task completed, and a meeting gets thrown into the mix where you didn’t expect one.

The result? You’re in a spiral where you’re reacting all the time, often to low-stakes work, and there is little time left in the day to achieve your priority tasks.

“Distraction is a dangerously deceptive saboteur of your goals,” Vaden confirms. “You must learn to ignore the small stuff in order to work on the big stuff.”

New skills

In practice, this means honing some new skills. Ask yourself if something needs to be done right now, or can it be added to your list for when you do have time? Learning how to say no to tasks that are outside of your remit, or delegating them down the chain, are tactics to develop.

Ask for clarification from your line manager about priorities: explain that you have capacity for a set number of tasks, and this will take you beyond your working potential. What other projects or tasks can be de-prioritised in favour? This on its own can provide leadership with the information that you’re taking on too much additional work.

Lastly, are there any tasks you do routinely that can be automated or have their processes improved? This could free up more precious time to focus on the bigger stuff, which will ultimately benefit your career.

If you have that nagging feeling that you’re running to stand still, it may be time for a new job. The three below are worth a look, with plenty more to discover on the Silicon Canals Job Board.

Software Engineer – Banking, Spendesk, Berlin

The banking team within Spendesk is in charge of everything related to money. The Software Engineer – Banking will develop and maintain the API that offers banking service, and the back office allowing internal auditors to operate the banking platform. You’ll use a stack including Typescript, Node.js for backend and banking applications and React/Redux on the front end. At least four years’ of experience in back-end development, as is strong experience in designing distributed and secure systems. Get all the details here.

Android Software Engineer, Contentsquare, Paris

Contentsquare is a digital experience analytics company dedicated to making the digital world more human. The Android Software Engineer will join the mobile data collection team, working on Contentsquare’s SDK, used for native iOS and Android applications. Kafka, Spark, Flink, Akka, ClickHouse and languages such as Scala, Golang, Python, C++ are all in use, as is monitoring and deployment, handled through Kibana, Grafana, Terraform, and Datadog.AWS and Azure. If this sounds like the role for you, apply for this job now.

Senior Full Stack Developer – English, Blue Lynx, Amsterdam

Blue Lynx is a recruiter seeking a Senior Full Stack Developer fluent in English for a client which is a leader in digital services for companies and entrepreneurs. You’ll work on a specialised hosting provider with complete focus on e-commerce using TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, and PHP. To be suitable, you’ll require a good level of experience in TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, PHP or similar as well as  an interest in modern web development and the continuously developing front-end landscape and you will understand browser concepts on a deep level. Get the full job spec here.

Want a new job with fewer distractions? There are thousands available on the Silicon Canals Job Board.