Busy on the Wrong Things: The Cost of Unclear Work Priorities

The tolerated pain

On Monday the owner asks for the new price list to be finished this week. On Tuesday a key customer complains and everyone drops everything. On Wednesday the operations manager asks for the stock count to be the priority. By Friday the price list is half done, the stock count is incomplete, and three people have spent the week on whichever request came from the most senior or the loudest voice. Everyone worked hard. Not enough of it was on the things that mattered most.

Businesses tolerate this because nobody is idle. Effort is visible everywhere. What is not visible is whether that effort is pointed at the right work, and whether the important but not urgent tasks ever get done at all.

This article is about employees who do not know, or cannot tell, which of their tasks matters most. It is related to high-value employees doing low-value admin, which deals with skilled people tied up in routine work. Here the issue is broader: effort spent on the wrong things because priorities are unclear, unstated or constantly changing.

Why businesses put up with it

• Priorities live in the owner's head. In a small business the founder knows what matters, and assumes everyone else does too.
• Every request arrives as urgent. Without a shared list, the most recent or most senior request wins by default.
• Work is invisible. When tasks sit in inboxes, chats and memory, nobody can see the full load, let alone rank it.
• Saying no feels risky. Employees would rather try to do everything than ask which request can wait.
• Busyness looks like progress. A full day is easily mistaken for a productive one.

Operational symptoms

• people asking "what should I work on first?" or, worse, not asking;
• important projects that are always "nearly finished" for months;
• work started, interrupted, abandoned and restarted;
• different managers giving the same person conflicting instructions;
• customer commitments missed while internal tasks are completed on time;
• teams optimising their own work in ways that slow down others, as described in when every department optimises its part but the whole process gets worse.

What the evidence says about clarity

Gallup has measured role clarity for decades through the statement "I know what is expected of me at work". In its article on why annual reviews fall short, drawing on data from 550 organisations and 2.2 million employees, Gallup reports that only about half of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them, and that only 12% strongly agree their manager helps them set work priorities. Gallup links improvements in clarity of expectations to productivity gains of 5% to 10% in its research. Its later analysis of US employee engagement found that clarity of expectations showed one of the largest declines since 2020, falling nine points.

These are large studies of employees generally, not measurements of your business. They do show that unclear priorities are common rather than unusual, and that clarity is measurably linked to output. Microsoft's Work Trend Index report Will AI Fix Work? also found that employees named unclear goals among the biggest obstacles to their productivity, second only to inefficient meetings.

How the pain becomes money

• Opportunity cost: the most valuable work, such as winning a contract, fixing a recurring problem or launching a product, is delayed while lower-value tasks are finished.
• Labour cost of switching and restarting: work dropped for a new "urgent" request must later be picked up again, with time lost re-familiarising.
• Revenue risk: customer commitments slip because nobody ranked them above internal tasks.
• Duplicated effort: two people tackle the same issue because neither knew the other had it.
• Retention cost: constantly shifting priorities frustrate capable people, and replacing them is expensive.

An illustrative cost model

This example is illustrative, with every figure an assumption to show the method. Picture a 20-person Pretoria professional services firm whose senior staff juggle client work, proposals and internal projects.

On these assumptions misdirected effort costs 48 hours a week, about R24,000 a week, or roughly R1.1 million a year. That is not money thrown away, because the lower-priority work still has some value. The real cost is the gap between what those hours produced and what they would have produced on the highest-priority work, such as a proposal that was submitted late or a fix that never happened. If clearer priorities redirected even half those hours, the firm would recover around 1,100 hours a year for its most important work. Estimate your own figures by asking a team to log, for two weeks, how much of their time went to work they would have ranked lower.

When it becomes commercially urgent

1. Strategic projects keep slipping while day-to-day work is always done.
2. Customer deadlines are missed because internal requests took precedence.
3. Staff report conflicting instructions from different managers.
4. The business is growing and the owner can no longer direct everyone personally.

What better looks like

Priorities are written down, ranked and visible. Each team has one ordered list of work, and each item has one owner. The idea is borrowed from software teams: the Scrum Guide describes the product backlog as an emergent, ordered list, with one person accountable for its order and others expected to persuade that person rather than bypass them. Most small businesses do not need Scrum, but they benefit from the same discipline: one list, in order, with someone who decides.

New requests go onto the list rather than straight to a person, and the person who ranks the list decides what moves down. Managers agree priorities with each other before giving instructions. A short weekly review checks whether the top items are moving. The guidance in how to separate urgent systems problems from merely annoying ones helps distinguish what is truly urgent from what merely feels it.

Practical next actions

1. Write down the top five priorities for the business this quarter, and share them with everyone.
2. Give each team one ordered list of work in a shared tool rather than in inboxes and chats.
3. Name the person who decides the order for each list, and route new requests to them.
4. Agree priorities between managers before instructions reach staff, to remove conflicting asks.
5. Review weekly whether the top items moved, and ask what stopped them if not.
6. Ask staff whether they know what matters most, and act on the answer.

Making work visible enough to rank is part of what what management cannot see usually becomes expensive describes, and setting up that visibility is part of Mellorca's managed digital operations work.

Bottom line

A busy team is not necessarily a productive one. When priorities are unclear, effort goes to whatever is most recent or most insistent, and the work that would make the biggest difference waits. One visible, ranked list per team, with one person who decides the order, costs very little and redirects hours the business is already paying for.

Sources and further reading

• Obsolete Annual Reviews: Gallup's Advice
• U.S. Employee Engagement Declines From 2020 Peak
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
• Scrum Guide | Scrum Guides