One thing about the word "PRIORITY" nobody has told you ... yet!

Well, let's take this very used term nowadays in the corporate world and think a little bit about its history, meaning, uses and how this little word can impact and affect your life.

If we go back in time, more precisely to the 14th century we find the first use of the equivalent of priority word in the Middle French and Latin. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (Source: www.etymonline.com) here it is the history behind the word priority:

“late 14c., "state of being earlier," from Old French priorite (14c.), from Medieval Latin prioritatem (nominative prioritas) "fact or condition of being prior," from Latin prior (see prior (adj.)). From c. 1400 as "precedence in right or rank." Wyclif (early 15c.) renders prioritas into (Middle) English as furtherhead.”

Therefore, according to the etymology, the word "priority" was conceived to define the first (or prime) thing to be done or noticed regarding to a defined context.

Additionally, using the Google N-gram tool we can see the use of the words "priority" and "priorities" from 1800 to 2015:

Clearly, the use of the word "priorities" was almost nonexistent before 1940, and until now the use of the word "priority" is much more frequent than its plural.

It is really obvious that the word "priority" has been used almost as a synonym of the most important thing, task or whatever it regarded to. There is no space for "priorities", for multiple filtering criteria and therefore focus shall be driven to the most important topic at the moment.

However, who has never been in a meeting where people were discussing the "priorities" of different tasks, and then the outcome was a wonderful multiple "priority" criteria and tasks nominated as: priority 1, priority 2, priority 3, priority a, priority b, etc..., with no clear Action Plan and THE PRIORITY issue/task defined.

This behavior has been hugely applied in our day-to-day corporate world and hence in our personal lives. The problem is that we are losing our capability of discerning what is really important and trying to bend reality as if we could handle more than one priority task at the same time, or maybe we do not want to seem careless about some task that currently is not priority. So, our brilliant idea is to classify every activity we perform as a "priority xyz task".

It turns out that it is becoming really difficult (and I include myself within this context) for us to perform trade-offs among options who seems all to be "priorities" . So we unconsciously try to do it all, and the outcome led by this behavior we all know by heart: being overwhelmed!

Therefore, shouldn't we try to define the clear priority, one at a time?

Source: www.actioncoach.com

By the way: "top priority" is a perfect grammar example of redundancy and pleonasm.

So, What do you think about the topic? I'd really like to hear your opinion.

Please

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