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Or you work at a non-software company where the technical folks ultimately report to a non-technical boss, or are outnumbered by nontechnical executives. In which case, there's the real danger of a bunch of 0 getting shoved down your collective throat to the tune of "it's all a priority, get it done."

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> "it's all a priority, get it done."

Reminds me of a product owner I had who abused priority categories by insisting that the majority of his tasks were "top priorities" because he had discovered that any time he didn't mark a task as a top priority it wouldn't get done.

Every team ended up sorting his tasks as a flat list so that when he asked people to "make this a top priority" it was up to him to decide where it went in the list and which of his other requests would get bumped.

That reminds me of a technique in the Slow Productivity book by Carl Newport. The gist is, if you cannot control the flow of work, the best thing to do is to create a buffer and make the workload visible. So they can visualize how any new task is going to disrupt it.

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