Prioritizing Is the Hardest Thing Your Brain Does. Your Calendar Treats It Like the Easiest.

The useful part

Image Picture the meeting where your organization decides what actually matters. The backlog refinement, the portfolio review, the roadmap call where someone finally asks what you should build next and what you should drop. Late morning after three other meetings, or worse, at four in the afternoon when everyone in the room has already spent the day deciding a hundred smaller things.

How it works

• The single most valuable act in any product organization, choosing what to do and what to refuse, gets handed to brains that have almost nothing left to do it with.
• They run their most expensive cognitive task on their cheapest available energy, then wonder why the priorities keep coming out wrong.
• The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles conscious reasoning, and it is small, slow, and...

What to take from it

David Rock has spent twenty years explaining why that is a problem.