Just because it is your priority, doesn't make it mine.

The current situation I have is that I have 5 people demanding that I have their stuff as a priority, and they will schedule meetings to tell me such.

If I'm in 5 hours of status update and demo meetings every day how much actual work is going to get completed?

This sounds like the tragedy of commons. If someone arranges a meeting with you, it is more likely that you will work on their project afterwards, because you have already been thinking about it during the meeting, you already have the context in your mind, and probably a few ideas about what to do next...

Therefore, everyone starts demanding meetings from you, because they have nothing to gain by not doing so -- you wouldn't use the extra time to work on their projects, but on the projects of those who insisted on meetings.

If you have so many meetings that you can't get actual work done, that sucks for everyone, but again, they have nothing to gain by canceling their meeting, unless everyone else does the same thing. But the others won't do the same thing, because now you have time to work on some projects, and they prefer those to be their projects.