On Priorities, Crises, and the Art of Knowing What Actually Matters
Somewhere, right now, someone is in a meeting about the font on the newsletter while the company is losing its best people. Somewhere, a couple is arguing about the dishes while the real conversation, the one about what they are both feeling, does not happen. Somewhere, a parent is chasing a small misbehaviour in a child who is quietly struggling with something much larger. The rat is real. The rat is genuinely a problem. But the house is on fire.
The Proverb as Triage
When yuh house deh pon fiyah, yuh nuh chase rat. This proverb is a lesson in priority and proportion. It does not say the rat is imaginary or that rat-chasing is foolish in ordinary circumstances. In a house that is not on fire, pest management is perfectly reasonable.
What this proverb calls out is the human tendency to pursue the familiar, manageable, smaller problem when there is a larger, more terrifying, more urgent problem. The rat is catchable. You know what to do with a rat. The fire is overwhelming and demands more of you than feels possible.
So sometimes we chase the rat because the rat is easier.
In the Home: What We Avoid by Staying Busy With Small Things
Every family has a version of the rat. The argument about who left the back door open. The repeated conversation about chores. The tension over a relative’s behaviour at a recent gathering. These are real things that need addressing. In a peaceful household, they would be the biggest thing on the agenda.
But sometimes families chase these rats energetically, almost compulsively, precisely because there is a larger fire they are not ready to face. The child who is clearly struggling. The marriage that is in trouble. The financial situation that has quietly become serious. The grief that no one has processed yet.
Research shows that when parents are highly stressed (maybe about money, health, relationships, or work), that stress manifests as behavioral issues in the child. The parent sees the child’s acting out as the problem to solve, when actually the child is responding to the unacknowledged crisis in the home.
Sometimes the rat-chasing is just normal household friction. But if you find the same small arguments recurring with increasing heat, it is worth asking whether the energy is really about the rat, or whether it is about the fire that no one has named yet.
In Relationships: The Arguments That Are Never Actually About What They Are About
The dishes argument. The lateness argument. The argument about the thing your partner said six months ago and which keeps coming back no matter how many times it seems resolved. These are rats. They are real. They are also almost never the whole point.
In most long-term relationships there are two or three large, unresolved things underneath the daily friction, core differences in needs, values, or expectations that have not been honestly examined. These are the fires. And they are frightening to face directly because facing them directly means acknowledging that resolution might be hard, or that both people might need to change, or that some things genuinely cannot be resolved.
Research in the U.S. found that 70% of couples avoided at least one major relationship conversation, especially about emotions, sex, money, and trust. Avoidance reflects fear, overwhelm, or doubts that talking will help.
So the rat-chasing continues until someone is willing to say: I think there is something larger here that we need to talk about.
At Work: The Leadership Discipline of Prioritisation Under Pressure
Under pressure, organisations and their leaders reveal whether they can actually do triage. Too often, the answer is often no. It is almost never because the people involved are unintelligent or uncaring. A study published in Frontiers in Communication found that effective organizational crisis response depends on sensemaking, clear communication, and learning, not just reacting to visible symptoms.
A 2024 study examined organizational change in two Jamaican organizations. The study confirmed the importance of focused leadership, communication, and the high levels of disruption, uncertainty, and expectancy associated with prolonged change efforts. Leaders often focus on manageable surface issues instead of the deeper organizational emergency. This can provide some sense of control when the larger situation feels out of control.
Effective leadership in crisis is the ability to name the fire clearly, loudly, and without panic, and then organise everyone’s attention around the fire rather than the rat. This requires a certain kind of courage that is less dramatic than it sounds but harder to sustain than any single heroic act: the ongoing discipline of asking, in every meeting and every decision: is this the most important thing to be working on right now?
If the answer is no, put it down. The rat will still be there after the fire is out.
The Practice of Honest Triage
At least once a week, whether personally or professionally, take five minutes to list the three things genuinely competing for your attention and ask honestly: which of these is the fire? Then do that first.
When you find yourself in a conflict that seems to loop without resolution, ask yourself and, if the relationship allows it, ask the other person: is this really what we are upset about? Or is there something larger underneath this?
In organisations, create space at the beginning of planning meetings to answer one question: what is the most important problem we need to solve? Not the most comfortable one. Not the one with the clearest solution. The most important one.
From the Bookshelf
Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of my favourite books. It contains a time management matrix that speaks directly to this proverb: the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and how we too often spend most of our time in the urgent-but-not-important quadrant while the important things burn quietly. It remains one of the clearest frameworks for this kind of self-management.
Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead both address the challenge of engaging with what is most important when it is also most frightening.
In Jamaican literature, Andrew Salkey’s Panic explores a society-level version of this dynamic beautifully.
Some others to check out:
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng (2014) tells the story of a family that faces tragedy. It is a devastating portrait of what happens when we focus on managing appearances instead of naming what’s really wrong.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (2021) – A New York Times bestseller that challenges conventional productivity thinking. Burkeman argues that the central challenge of time management isn’t becoming more efficient. It’s deciding what to neglect.
A Closing Thought
The rat matters. You are not wrong to notice it. In a different season, chasing it would be exactly right.
But your house is on fire. And the fire will not wait for the rat.
What is the real fire in your life right now, the one you have been circling rather than facing directly? What would it take to turn toward it this week?
Leave a Reply