If Everything is a Priority, Nothing is a Strategy

How PR teams can drive impact in a year when everything already feels urgent.

There’s a moment every communicator knows well.

You’re skimming a request that’s just landed in your inbox and flagged urgent (as if there were any other setting). You start reading, and within a few lines, the pattern becomes clear.

Everything is a priority.

The initiative you’re working on right now is urgent. That upcoming launch is a priority. Resetting the internal narrative needs to be done ASAP. A social series that was presented months ago has now been approved and needs to move forward. Priority. And now this timely request needs to happen before end of the week to support broader business and client expectations. Priority.

Now, it’s worth pausing here because none of this is necessarily bad. In many cases, this level of activity is a sign of a healthy, ambitious organization. These initiatives are important, well-intentioned, and several likely have real potential to resonate both internally and externally.

But layered beneath this momentum is a more dangerous assumption: that everything can be a priority at once.

It can’t.

It also assumes that the media is standing by to cover all of these storylines. That The Wall Street Journal can reliably make room. That Bloomberg has availability this week. That your industry’s leading trade publication is ready for these exact angles, at this exact moment.

As if these outlets don’t have their own news cycles, editorial priorities, and competitive pressures. As if they aren’t simultaneously covering dozens of companies, leaders, markets, and macro forces. As if attention were something you could simply order on demand.

When everything starts to feel like a priority, you don’t have a strategy—you have a stress test. And for PR teams, the real work isn’t absorbing that pressure quietly. It’s navigating it with clarity and discipline, without overpromising, burning relationships, or eroding trust.

Here’s how to do exactly that.

Strategy Requires Tradeoff.

A real strategy isn’t a laundry list of everything you’d like to do. It’s a set of choices you’re willing to defend. It highlights what comes first, what waits, and what doesn’t happen at all so the first two can actually succeed.

Yet many comms plans today are really just collections of good intentions with zero hierarchy.