What does it mean that priority debt?

Consistently neglecting important but non-urgent priorities creates a growing liability.

Example: You have been meaning to have a serious conversation with your business partner about the company's strategic direction for three months. Every week it gets displaced by something more urgent — a client deliverable, a hiring decision, a product bug. The conversation is important but never urgent, so it never happens. Meanwhile, small disagreements about direction accumulate. You make conflicting promises to different clients because you have not aligned on what the company actually does. Your partner hires someone who does not fit the strategy you had in mind, because you never articulated the strategy together. By month four, the conversation you finally have is not a calm strategic alignment — it is a crisis meeting about why the company feels like it is pulling in two directions. The thirty-minute conversation you kept deferring has become a two-day offsite to untangle three months of compounding misalignment. That is priority debt with interest.

Try this: Identify three important-but-not-urgent priorities you have been consistently deferring for at least four weeks. For each one, answer three questions: (1) What was the original cost of addressing this when you first noticed it? Estimate in hours and emotional difficulty on a 1-10 scale. (2) What is the cost of addressing it now, after weeks of deferral? Same metrics. (3) What will the cost be if you defer it for another four weeks? The gap between answers one and two is the interest you have already paid. The gap between two and three is the interest that is about to come due. Pick the one with the steepest compounding curve and schedule a specific time this week to begin paying it down.