Achieve More By Doing Less: The Art Of Ruthless Prioritisation

How to manage overwhelm as a leader

This week, we'll explore:

• Why prioritisation is challenging and what to do about it

• A practical framework for making tough decisions

• How to communicate priorities effectively with stakeholders

Introduction

As you stare at your calendar, packed with meetings, your team's backlog keeps growing. Multiple stakeholders need your team to work on things, and they all tell you their projects are of the “highest priority."

Sound familiar?

The truth is that all engineering leaders face a daily battle with prioritisation. But nobody tells you that the problem isn't having too much to do. It's trying to do too much.

Let's break down how to fix this.

The Prioritisation Paradox

When everything is important, nothing is important. Yet most engineering leaders fall into the trap of trying to please everyone. They say yes to new requests while existing projects fall behind. Their teams become overwhelmed, quality suffers, and deadlines slip.

• This approach doesn't work. Here's why:

• Teams lose focus when juggling too many priorities

• Context switching kills productivity

• Quality suffers as people rush to complete tasks

• Team morale drops as deadlines consistently slip

Saying “No”

The first step to mastering prioritisation is realising it’s about one thing: choosing the few things you can do from the many that you’re being asked to do. This means you have to say “no” a lot.

This might make you feel like you’re constantly letting people down by saying no. You might also find that people will push back when you say no. This is all part of the game. You must be confident in your decisions to take on new work and communicate clearly when your team can’t meet a deadline or deliver a deliverable.

Ultimately, your team has a work-in-progress (WIP) limit. When you exceed it, your team becomes overloaded. In practice, when new work comes in, you have to either

• Delay the incoming work until you have enough capacity

• Say no to the incoming work (because it isn’t significant enough)

• Reprioritise existing work

A Better Approach: The Priority Pipeline

Instead of trying to do everything, successful engineering leaders use a simple but powerful framework. Here's how it works:

1. The Input Filter

Before any new work enters your pipeline, ask three questions:

• Does this align with our strategic goals?

• Do we have the resources to deliver this properly?

• What is the actual cost of not doing this?

The goal is to get honest about whether you can and should take on any new work. Often, projects labelled as “urgent” by stakeholders aren’t truly urgent at all. This step is all about clearly thinking objectively through each request.

2. The Priority Matrix

While many complex prioritisation frameworks exist, a simple approach can work equally well.

Sort all work into these categories:

• Critical: Security, stability, revenue-blocking issues, customer-impacting issues

• Strategic: Long-term value, significant improvements

• Nice-to-have: Small enhancements, minor fixes

• Not now: Everything else

Within each category, order the work items in order of importance.

Sometimes, work will fall into a grey area between critical and nice-to-have. The important thing is to think objectively about the relative importance of the work.

3. The Resource Split

If you only prioritise what’s urgent, your team can quickly slip into constant firefighting mode where nothing important gets done. Ultimately, you must balance urgent/reactive/unplanned work and more strategic long-term projects.

One way to do this is to think in terms of a ratio. For example, you might allocate your team’s time like this:

• 40% Critical work (security fixes, customer impacting operational issues)

• 40% Strategic initiatives (projects that result in long-term business value)

• 20% Nice-to-have improvements

Making It Work in Practice

Here's your action plan:

1. List Everything

Create a single list of all current and requested work. Include everything, no matter how small.

2. Apply The Filter

For each item, ask:

• What problem does this solve?

• Who benefits from this?

• What is the impact if we delay this?

3. Make Hard Decisions

Be ruthless. If something isn't Critical or Strategic, move it to Nice-to-have or Not now.

4. Communicate Clearly

Tell stakeholders:

• What you're prioritising and why

• What isn't being prioritised

• When you'll review priorities again

5. Review Weekly

Prioritise are constantly changing. Schedule a weekly time to review existing priorities and decide if anything needs adjusting. Choosing what to work on is one of the highest-leverage things you can do as a leader. If you get it wrong, your team will waste a lot of effort working on the wrong things or become overloaded and inefficient.

The Bottom Line

Your job isn't to do everything. It's to focus your team’s limited time and energy on the most valuable things.

The best engineering leaders aren't the ones who say yes to everything. They're the ones who say no to most things so they can say yes to what truly matters.

Start today. Look at your current priorities. Are they priorities? Or are you just afraid to say no?

Your team is counting on you to make these decisions. Make them count.

Thanks for reading.

Bonus: Templates For Tough Conversations

When saying no to stakeholders, use this format:

"I understand [project] is important. We're focused on [current priorities] because [strategic reason]. We can review this again in [timeframe]."

When explaining priorities to your team:

"Our focus this quarter is [priority]. Everything else is secondary. If something doesn't support this goal, it's not a priority right now."