---
name: operating-priorities
description: "Set company operating priorities through bottleneck analysis, calendar review, and delegation."
---

# Operating Priorities

Use this skill when a company leader is overloaded, scattered, or reacting to noise instead of running the business deliberately. Do not use it for personal task management or arbitrary engineering-plan prioritization.

## References

Load [operating-rules.md](references/operating-rules.md) before auditing the calendar or diagnosing recurring execution traps.

## Required Inputs

Collect before prescribing. Label estimates when evidence is incomplete.

- Company stage and the leader's current primary job
- Current bottleneck (customers, product, delivery, hiring, cash, distribution, or other)
- Representative calendar or time log for a recent week
- Active commitments and constraints (people, contracts, health, fundraising process)
- Available outcome evidence for major activities
- What the leader believes must happen this week and this month

Hand off runway, unit economics, and hiring ROI analysis to `bootstrapped-finance`; longer-horizon company direction to `company-strategy`; pricing and packaging to `pricing-strategy`; demand validation to `product-validation`; growth-metric definition to `north-star-metric`; and launch shipping decisions to `launch-readiness`. Do not invent motives or fabricate opportunity costs.

## Workflow

1. Clarify company stage and the leader's main job right now.
2. List the highest-leverage outcomes for:
   - today
   - this week
   - this month
3. Decide what to cut, delegate, or defer. For people, contractual, or legal commitments, stop future irreversible steps and escalate rather than improvising restructuring.
4. Reshape the calendar by purpose and intended outcome, not meeting format.
5. Define a short operating cadence for review, follow-up, and escalation.
6. Challenge the assumption most likely to break the plan. Treat avoidance as a hypothesis to test, not a motive to assert. When evidence is thin, inspect recent decisions and rejected alternatives, feedback dismissed or deferred, repeatedly avoided work, what an informed critic would challenge, and which feared outcome could be shaping the choice. Report only patterns supported by examples.
7. Define the evidence that would invalidate the current priority set or require a change.

## Standards

- A leader's calendar should reflect company strategy.
- If everything is priority one, the leader is not deciding.
- Use explicit tradeoffs, not motivational slogans.
- Challenge the decision, not the person; tie pushback to visible evidence.
- Systems should reduce chaos, not add ceremony.
- Require human judgment before recommending layoffs, reporting-line changes, or irreversible commitments.

## Output

Return:

1. **Operating priorities:** today / week / month outcomes
2. **Calendar changes:** purpose-based blocks and what moves or stops
3. **Cut / delegate / defer:** with reversibility and escalation notes
4. **Cadence:** lightweight review, follow-up, and escalation rhythm
5. **Execution traps:** stage-fit risks and the assumption under challenge
6. **Revisit triggers / kill criteria:** evidence that would change the plan
7. **Unknowns:** missing inputs labeled explicitly