This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Priorities
Lesson 1: Prioritisation (Selective Investment Edition)
Most people don’t prioritise based on what’s important.
Loud things win, so you prioritise based on what feels urgent, visible or downright uncomfortable to ignore.
And that’s how you end up treating every email, task or mildly stressed colleague like an emergency while the strategically important work sits untouched in the corner developing abandonment issues.
Taylor Swift meanwhile seems to understand this instinctively: not everything deserves equal airtime, attention or investment.
Because nobody accidentally manages stadium tours, re-recordings, documentaries, new albums, and directing music videos all at once by reacting to everything with the same level of urgency.
Not every song becomes a single.
Not every opinion deserves a response.
Not every critic gets airtime.
And not every task deserves to become the main character of your day.
On planet Taylor, prioritisation clearly stops being about finding enough hours in the day and starts becoming about deciding what deserves your time, energy and attention in the first place.
Or as Tay Tay herself once put it in her debut New Heights interview:
“You should think of your energy as if it’s expensive, as if it’s a luxury item. Not everyone can afford it.”
Which means getting better at filtering, not scheduling.
Knowing the difference between:
things that are legendary,
things that are momentary,
and things that are unnecessary.
Let’s unpack this.
Legendary work is usually the thing you keep avoiding because it actually matters. The difficult conversation. The strategic decision. The piece of work with consequences attached to it. The work that materially changes outcomes if you do it well and visibly inconveniences your ego if you don’t.
That’s the clue. Legendary work often feels uncomfortable, ambiguous or slightly terrifying.
Momentary work meanwhile arrives loudly but changes very little long term. Meetings. Approvals. “Quick questions.” Calendar invites sent by people whose inability to plan ahead has somehow become your problem.
Momentary work does matter. The key is not accidentally promoting it into legendary status simply because it showed up wrapped in urgency with a side of mild panic.
Then there’s unnecessary work, where an alarming percentage of corporate life seems to live. Alignment sessions nobody needed fifteen people on. Thirty slides explaining decisions that could have survived perfectly well as two bullet points and a grown up conversation.
Unnecessary work is dangerous because it’s really just productivity theatre. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s talking. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing meaningful has happened despite everyone behaving like they just completed a military operation.
Getting better at filtering the noise is really about getting better at pausing before you react.
Long enough to ask:
Is this legendary, momentary or unnecessary?
Is this actually important or just loud?
And am I doing this because it changes outcomes or because I like feeling like I’m actually getting shit done? (You’re not, by the way.)
Because the people who filter well are not necessarily more disciplined than everyone else.
They’re just better at recognising the difference between urgency and significance.
Next up: Part 2 of our Taylor’s Version series, Death by a Thousand Clarifications. Because over explaining is also a form of unnecessary work.
While the rest of us are treating every Teams notification like a national emergency and emotionally supporting our inbox instead of making real decisions, Taylor Swift seems to understand exactly why our priorities are such a mess: we treat everything equally. She doesn’t.
No task gets equal airtime, attention or energy.
Some things are legendary. Some are momentary. And some are just unnecessary productivity theatre dressed up as progress, because reacting to loud things feels easier than actively deciding what deserves your investment.
Turns out prioritisation was never really a time management problem after all.