Across many projects, the task that unblocks others outranks the one that's merely urgent

The advice I gave on LinkedIn: “When managing multiple cloud projects, I prioritize tasks by focusing on business value, assessing urgency, and identifying dependencies. By aligning tasks with our strategic objectives, I ensure that we are maximizing productivity and driving organizational goals forward. Additionally, recognizing tasks that can unblock others allows the team to work in parallel, maintaining a smooth workflow and enhancing overall efficiency.”

I’d say the same today. What’s worth teasing out is how the third criterion — dependencies — differs in kind from the first two.

Business value and urgency are properties a task has on its own. You can score them by looking at the task in isolation: how much it’s worth, how soon it’s needed. That’s why they’re the instinctive way to prioritize — they produce a clean ranked list. But they share a blind spot: they treat each task as if finishing it only delivers its own value, and nothing more.

Dependencies break that assumption, and that’s what makes them special. An unblocking task is worth its own value plus the value of everything it frees up to run in parallel. A small, low-urgency, unglamorous task can outrank a high-value one purely because three other workstreams are idling behind it. You can’t see that by scoring the task alone — only by looking at the shape of the graph it sits in.

So when I’m juggling several projects, I rank by value and urgency, and then I let dependencies override the list. The question isn’t only “what’s the most important thing?” but “what’s the thing whose completion unlocks the most other work?” The first question optimizes a single task. The second optimizes the whole team’s throughput — and across many projects, throughput is the game.