I call this "business as usual". Whenever I need to choose between prioritizing myself vs prioritizing my employer, I try to use the "business as usual" philosophy in which I understand that the employer would fire me if they had to choose to save money (rather than for example cutting CEO's salary or in any other way looking at employee's interests). So I prioritize myself. I learned this lesson when I was contracting for a client and the client told me, on Friday afternoon that starting from next week he doesn't need my services anymore. Basically he fired me on the spot. Next week I noticed that someone was still making programming changes to the site. Seems like he hired a bunch of inexperienced inexpensive developers to do the work. Needless to say, a year later he asked me to jump back in, and I did for double the price. He, in his true "business as usual" style, didn't even blink. He needed the job done and was willing to pay the price I offered. Business as usual. Great life lesson.