Sequence as Priority

Labeling 900 things as P0 is 100% guaranteed to drive dysfunction.

A human brain cannot handle the idea that a critical priority isn’t being actively worked on or isn’t already complete.

— Evan LaPointe (@evanlapointe) July 14, 2025

Once you reflect a bit on your own experience, you realize that you need to switch to what Evan is mentioning as “sequence over priority”.

I find myself doing that using dependency graphs:

Start by laying down all tasks as nodes. I use Obsidian Canvas for that. After listing “what should be done”, now connect dependencies “what must be done to unlock another task”. This should be hard dependencies. (simple e.g., API Design must be done before API Implementation.)

Once you have those, you need to topologically sort the graph you end up with. Here’s a picture from the wikipedia page explaining topological sorting

You can see that many sequences are now possible. Each sequence ensures that if done one element at a time, all dependencies are respected. That means you would have 5, 7, 3 which could start in any order, and the rest can only appear in order of dependency.

At that point, it’s about resource management and second look at this sequence. I personally aim for leading dominoes. Considering all else equal (effort required, urgency of project, etc..) 7 “unlocks more tasks downstream” hence shows as a nice contender to start with.

At this level it’s a management decision on how to proceeed. That’s what constitute your execution strategy. What is important, as Evan mentioned, is to be able to lay down a clear list. The hardest aspect here is maintaining/updating this task graph as you go. Especially when blockers happen, you depend on some team that suddenly can’t deliver/is late, you had bad effort estimation and you need to shuffle things around, etc. (you will be punched in the face) Make sure to keep track of your failures and push yourself against the “everything is important because all customers are important” or anything similar. What’s important is keeping your team going and having real impact. A million priorities are confusiing.

Practice so you can always answer “Now what?” and keep a healthy momentum.