What you don’t focus on can be more important than what you do focus on

The common infinite high priority backlog

In a growing organization it’s very easy to fall into the trap of assigning every decent idea and initiative a high priority.

The average manager tends to just add things to an ever growing list of high priority tasks. Engineers are then left having to assume something like recency as the main ranking factor, or just working on what they feel like doing that day.

Enter deprioritizing

Great managers however can tell you what not to focus on. They can tell you what to actively sacrifice in order to deliver the most impactful results. This helps you focus on the areas that matter the most.

In my experience at VEED.IO, starting with what is not important, on what can be neglected without causing issues, will yield better priorities overall. In some extreme cases this can even mean killing products and product features that just aren’t worth maintaining. In most cases it just means not polishing that random feature that almost no-one is using.

This can sometimes also help make room for technical excellence, and building a smaller, but more robust system by counteracting feature creep.

How do?

One of the ways you can deprioritize more is to always consider opportunity cost. Think about all the other opportunities you’re missing out on when doing something. Is this really the best thing you could be spending your time on?

How this improves communication

If we look at this in the context of a company, this will also better communicate to everyone what is the most important to the organization, and produce better alignment. Better alignment will mean that all those small decisions engineers make each day will align with the goals of the organization, which in turn will lead to higher velocity. I think this might be because when the developers can anticipate future work, they can save time on the parts that don’t need to be that flexible, but already prepare for changes that might be coming soon.

You can even apply this to your personal life

We can even see the same thing in our own lives, where we’d want to do a million things, but we never have enough time to do all of them. I suggest we also take a inverse approach and think of the things we want to do less of.

Example

Let’s assume you want to learn a new skill, and let’s assume that all your free time is already taken. Now you have to think, what can I cut out of my day or reduce to make time for this? Your answer may even be that nothing is worth cutting out, but at least in the end you’ll be left more satisfied because you’ll know you have your priorities straight.