I think my answer to that is something of the kind of: “Work is going to be prioritized one way or another. If you don’t tell me which one you want me to work on first I’ll pick the one I like best, and we’ll see which of the problems never gets finished.”

I think this only works if you’ve already set boundaries on your time though.

I usually work on the latest task, last-in-first-out system. If someone has a higher priority they should bug be more to get bumped up. The reason is that I want to finish at least a few tasks without delays. For large tasks I ask them to select the ordering.

There are occasionally times when everything is critical. Often this is in the early stages of survival for a company.

If this is a chronic problem, or it's an established company, though, you realistically have two solutions that don't lead to burnout:

1. Don't deliver everything you're asked for

2. Find a new job

Once that culture is established it's extremely hard to change. It certainly will not fix itself.

I agree completely. I was working for a company that had been around for over 20 years and when that happened, I did both 1&2. It was pretty clear that I had made all the improvements I could there and that nothing would get any better.

I love repeating the phrase “if it’s all top priority than none of it is top priority”

I worked at a company like this (for f...ing 10 years!), beeing fired at the end was the best thing that could happen to me, it lead me to a much less stressfull job with much better pay