Deprioritization Is a Decision

1. Deprioritization is a decision, not a drift I spent a chunk of Friday declining recurring meetings. Every standing invite is an automatic withdrawal from your attention that renews forever until someone stops it — and the ones that outlive their purpose are exactly the ones nobody thinks to cancel, because canceling requires someone to decide. Nothing falls off your plate on its own. It comes off because you take it off, on purpose, out loud, and you tell the organizer why. The half hour isn’t the real cost anyway; it’s the context switch on either side of it, and the quiet signal to your team that attending things is the job. Takeaway: Put a recurring block on your own calendar to audit your other recurring blocks. Decline what no longer earns the half hour, and say why. 2. The integration usually isn’t the hard part The connection between a new service and the target system worked on the first try. What blocked us was a network policy — the target only accepted traffic from…