I kinda like this prioritization framework:

1. Generally, prioritize company and team priorities over my own
2. If I’m getting deenergized, artificially prioritize some energizing work. Increase the quantity until equilibrium is restored
3. If the long-term balance between energy and proper priorities can’t be balanced for more than a year, stop everything else and work on solving this (e.g. change your role or quit)

Also more blog posts like this please:

I’ve come to appreciate that many of the folks I silently accused of malpractice were balancing context that I had no idea existed.

Also good advice (that’s also applicable to blogging):

There’s no one solution, but you’re going to accomplish less in your career if you’re so focused on correctness that you lose track of keeping yourself energized.

And lastly, I like this open acknowledgement that sometimes you have to do the thing that’s not a top priority so that you can generate the energy to do the thing that is a top priority:

It’s not only reasonable to violate perfectly correct priorities to energize yourself and your team, modestly violating priorities to energize your team in pursuit of a broader goal is an open leadership secret. Leadership is getting to the correct place quickly, it’s not necessarily about walking in the straightest line. Gleefully skipping down a haphazard path is often faster than purposeful trudging down the safest path.

folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.

Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct…will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate correct priorities to energize yourself and your team, modestly violating priorities to energize your team enroute to a broader goal is an open leadership secret. Leadership is getting to the correct place quickly, it’s not necessarily about walking in the straightest line.

The most important lesson I’ve learned as I’ve become a better manager is that there is almost always a correct answer, but applying that answer to your specific situation will always be nuanced and messy. Further, the correct answer is almost always different if you’re taking a short-term or long-term perspective.

Even if we shipped more features one quarter than another, I wouldn’t actually believe that our velocity had necessarily gone up, it’s more likely that the features themselves were smaller.

I’ve reluctantly come to believe that URIs and email are the durable interface and protocol that will live long past every given platform’s peak adoption...

If you plan to write across decades, you simply must own the interfaces to your content. You should absolutely delve into other platforms as they come and go–they often become extraordinary communities with great distribution–but they’ll never be a durable home.

Agree. This is why I have a hard time, as much as I want to, jumping on these modern email platforms that don’t support standard email protocols (something I wrote about previously).