Another related explanation is just simply that there are higher priority items, rather than just the priorities not aligning to working on any of Tasks A-Z eff

Another related explanation is just simply that there are higher priority items, rather than just the priorities not aligning to working on any of Tasks A-Z efficiently. Then the question is why are they saying things like "top of my list" when it's not? If they are saying that anyway. Maybe because they think they'll get punished for talking back to you about the priority list? Or just hope you'll go away. Meanwhile if someone is aware of one of these canaries, it's asshole behavior to hide its existence from the person who is carrying out the related task, up to some limit of obviousness. There's something to this concept beyond just any tracking mechanism like "did they open that file in Perforce for edit?" (Ignoring they can work offline, or otherwise defeat the canary monitoring while still "collecting" it.) When it's something you know is needed to make progress, put it and all the other intermediate steps in the Tasks List for a work item if you know them; breaking things up into concrete realizable chunks is how we make progress and prevent floundering.