One thing I recently learned: Talking about "impact" rather than "importance" makes prioritization easier. Why? "Importance" pushes you to think about less ta

One thing I recently learned: Talking about "impact" rather than "importance" makes prioritization easier. Why? "Importance" pushes you to think about less tangible value judgements, including anxieties that your brain wants to escape from thinking about. "How important is it to write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "ummm...kinda ...very? (I am a good manager...right?)" "Impact" pushes you to think about more tangble events, including risks that your brain can concretely imagine their cost. "What is the impact when you write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "It prevents them from misunderstanding the goal of a task so they're less likely to go down a rabbit hole. It enables them to execute more quickly by strengthening thier brain's 'you're doing the right thing, keep doing' motivation signal. It spends an opportunity to teach them how to identify a clear Definition of Done. It spends some of my time." Because the cost/benefit of a task's impact is more imaginable, it is easier to decide to spend more resources to do it right or to cleanly abandon the task.