[asoneth]

> "it's all a priority, get it done."

Reminds me of a product owner I had who abused priority categories by insisting that the majority of his tasks were "top priorities" because he had discovered that any time he didn't mark a task as a top priority it wouldn't get done.

Every team ended up sorting his tasks as a flat list so that when he asked people to "make this a top priority" it was up to him to decide where it went in the list and which of his other requests would get bumped.

[skydhash]

That reminds me of a technique in the Slow Productivity book by Carl Newport. The gist is, if you cannot control the flow of work, the best thing to do is to create a buffer and make the workload visible. So they can visualize how any new task is going to disrupt it.