A complementary advice to the point 1 based on my work experience is that no matter how many priorities there are defined in a planning system, in practice it all collapses to only two values:
Priority One
Priority “this will never get done, because there will always be some Priority One task to do instead”
So whenever you propose a thing to do and your manager says “okay, we can give this a priority two”, now you know that this is merely a polite way to say “no”.
(My advice for software developers is that if you want to do things such as automated tests or documentation, you must insist that those are not separate tasks, but an inseparable part of the programming task, a part of the “definition of done”. Otherwise, these tasks will get a priority two, and now you know what that means...)
A complementary advice to the point 1 based on my work experience is that no matter how many priorities there are defined in a planning system, in practice it all collapses to only two values:
Priority One
Priority “this will never get done, because there will always be some Priority One task to do instead”
So whenever you propose a thing to do and your manager says “okay, we can give this a priority two”, now you know that this is merely a polite way to say “no”.
(My advice for software developers is that if you want to do things such as automated tests or documentation, you must insist that those are not separate tasks, but an inseparable part of the programming task, a part of the “definition of done”. Otherwise, these tasks will get a priority two, and now you know what that means...)