2026-06-18
6 分钟The Economist.
Work is a series of decisions about what to prioritize.
Occasionally, events set the agenda.
When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020, for example,
it was pretty obvious which problems firms had to focus on.
But normally managers must weigh up for themselves how to allocate capital, decide
which initiatives to concentrate on and work out which numbers matter most.
Product teams have to choose which features to work on first.
Sales teams must decide which customers to focus on and day by day,
hour by hour, individuals have to work out how to spend their next chunk of time.
It's a shame then that people are often very bad at setting priorities.
Individuals seem to be so motivated by achieving goals of any kind that they find it hard to abandon them.
In one lab experiment, Timothy Ballard of the University of Queensland
and his co-authors asked participants to pursue two competing goals and varied the monetary rewards on offer.
Even in cases where the reward for achieving one goal was the same as achieving both,
and pursuing both made it more likely that neither would be attained, participants tried to get both done.
When people have to make a choice about what to do next,
they often pick the thing that seems achievable, even if that is not in their interests.
A paper by Moti Ammar of the Ono Academic College and his co-authors found that indebted
consumers prioritised paying off small debts ahead of larger debts with higher interest rates.