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Let’s dive in.

A while back, I got a DM on LinkedIn from a Director named Laura.

She managed a team. They were drowning. Every project was “high priority.” Every deadline was yesterday. Her team was burning out. And she didn’t know where to start.

“How do I coach my team to set priorities when their plates are full?”

That question hit me. Not because it was unusual. Because I’ve lived it.

When I was running a $100M P&L with 400 people, I remember weeks where I had 47 “top priorities” on the board. Forty-seven. At some point, that’s not a priority list. That’s a cry for help.

So I built Sarah a cheat sheet. I pulled together every prioritization framework I’ve used across 25 years of leadership. For individuals. For teams. For executives.

I posted it on LinkedIn.

3.5 million impressions. Tens of thousands of saves. 100s of DMs from leaders saying, “I needed this yesterday.”

Turns out, almost everyone is fighting the same battle. Too much on the plate. Not enough clarity on what actually matters.

The reason it resonated? This isn’t a “work harder” problem. It’s a “think clearer” problem.

And there are real tools that can help.

Why this matters for leaders

Let me tell you what I’ve seen happen in every overwhelmed team I’ve ever led or coached.

The list grows. Nobody removes anything. New requests pile on top of old ones. And people start context-switching between 12 things, making real progress on none of them.

The uncomfortable truth is that setting priorities means making cuts. It means looking at a list of things that all seem important and saying, “Not this. Not now.”

That’s hard. Especially when you’re a high performer who doesn’t want to let anyone down.

But when you try to do everything, you guarantee mediocre results across the board. The math doesn’t work any other way.

I’m not going to walk you through every method on the cheat sheet. You can grab that and go deep on your own.

But I want to highlight the ones that have made the biggest difference for me at different stages.

Sort everything into 4 buckets:

Most people are shocked at how much of their day lives in that bottom-left corner. Urgent but not important. Busy work disguised as real work.

Categorize every initiative:

That last category is the whole game. If your team can’t name what’s a “won’t have,” they don’t really have priorities. They have a wish list.

Not “get to them later.” Avoid them. Because those 20 are the most dangerous items on your list. They’re interesting enough to steal your attention but not important enough to move the needle.

When I was leading 400 people, I learned something the hard way.

Every time I said yes to something that wasn’t a real priority, I was saying no to my team’s capacity. No to their focus. No to their ability to do excellent work on the things that actually mattered.

Saying yes to everything isn’t generous. It’s expensive.

The best leaders I’ve worked with protect their team’s attention the way a CFO protects the budget. Every new commitment has a cost. And the cost is always paid by someone on the team.

I still practice this today. I run a 12-person team while building a business and raising a family. The stakes are different. The scale is smaller. But the discipline is exactly the same.

Every Monday, I look at the week ahead and ask 2 questions:

If I can’t answer the second question, I don’t really have priorities.

Grab the cheat sheet. Pick one framework that fits where you are right now.

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s clarity. And clarity is what lets good teams do great work.

Keep leading forward,
Justin