The nonsensical idea of more than one priority

My wife spent this week gobbling up Greg McKeown’s best-selling book, Essentialism. She’s been sharing some of the cool insights with me along the way. One in particular kind of blew my mind.

Apparently the word “priority” came into the English language via Old French and Latin around the 15th century. And here’s the thing: It was SINGULAR.

It meant the first or prior thing. And English speaking humans used it as singular for the next FIVE HUNDRED years.

It was only relatively recently, around the 1900s, that we pluralize the word. So we started talking about priorities.

Greg explains that “Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple ‘first’ things.”

Words mean things and language is powerful. I’m going to see if I can start using the word in a healthier way. Because, hello, we all know deep down that you can’t have multiple things be THE priority.

This builds on the idea of managing work in progress and going slower to go faster. If you want to read a bit more I recommend James Clear’s excellent article “The Myth of Multitasking: Why Fewer Priorities Leads to Better Work”