Ask a small team what's a priority and the honest answer is often "everything," which means priority has stopped functioning as a signal at all. On a small team without a dedicated project manager, this usually isn't a tooling problem, it's a habit problem: nobody ever removed anything from the top tier, so the top tier grew to include most of the board.
Separate urgent from important, on purpose
Urgent means it has a deadline pressing on it right now. Important means it actually moves the business forward, regardless of when it's due. A lot of what feels urgent (a Slack message asking for status, a minor bug someone noticed) is neither, and a lot of what's genuinely important (fixing the process that keeps generating urgent fires) never feels urgent enough to get scheduled. Sorting on both axes, not just "how loud is the ask," is the actual fix for priority inflation.
Cap how much can be top priority at once
A hard, explicit limit, for example no more than three items marked highest priority per person at a time, forces a real choice instead of letting the label creep upward by default. Adding a new top-priority item should mean actively deciding something else drops down, not just tacking one more onto an already-long list.
Review the list on a cadence, not just when it feels urgent
Priorities set once at the start of a sprint or week quietly go stale as new information arrives. A short, recurring review, even five minutes at the start of the week, is what actually keeps priority meaning something, rather than reflecting whatever was true three weeks ago when it was first set.
Let the tool carry the signal, not a separate conversation
Priority only works as a team-wide signal if everyone can see it without asking. A shared board where priority and labels are visible on the card itself means a new hire or a teammate picking up slack can tell what matters most without a side conversation, which is the entire point of setting it in the first place.
Written by Sakib Islam, founder of Wrkbase
Notes on how the product is actually built.
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