What is priority decision making?

Example: Your phone buzzes with a Slack message asking whether the team should use tabs or spaces in the config file. Your chest tightens slightly — someone is waiting. Meanwhile, the architecture document that would prevent six months of technical debt sits in a tab you haven't opened in three days. The Slack thread feels urgent because someone is watching. The architecture document is important because it shapes the next two quarters. You answer the Slack message. The document waits another day. This is not a time management failure — it is an urgency-importance confusion playing out exactly as the research predicts.

This concept is part of Priority Systems in the How to Think curriculum.