The $10 Game for Personal Priorities
Allocate a notional $10 across your priorities to expose where your time actually goes versus where it should.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 85%
An adaptation of the classic $10 prioritization exercise, applied to an individual's time in a manager-report conversation. You list your priorities and divide $10 across them to represent where your time goes. Tiny allocations reveal priorities you claim to care about but barely touch, forcing an honest check on alignment.
Origin
Megan Cook adapting the well-known $10 game (usually used for strategy prioritization) to individual priorities in one-on-ones.
Core principles
- 01A fixed budget forces trade-offs that a wish-list hides
- 02Where time actually goes is the real priority, whatever you say
- 03Tiny allocations (10 cents) expose priorities that aren't really moving
- 04The exercise tests both alignment and impact on the business
How to run it
- 1
List your priorities
In a one-on-one, you and your manager list out all of your current priorities.
- 2
Divide $10 across them by time spent
Allocate a notional $10 to represent where you're actually spending all of your time across those priorities.
Pro tip Force real proportions rather than spreading evenly to feel balanced.
- 3
Interrogate the tiny allocations
For any priority that gets a sliver — '10 cents this week' — ask what that really amounts to (20-30 minutes) and whether that's enough to move anything.
Pro tip A 10-cent allocation usually means the priority isn't actually moving and needs a decision.
- 4
Check alignment and impact
Evaluate whether your priorities stack up and whether you're spending time on the things most likely to move the business forward.
In the wild
Doing the exercise with people, Cook has seen someone allocate just 10 cents to a priority for the week — about 20-30 minutes — and recognized that isn't enough to actually move it.
→ It surfaces where time and stated priorities are misaligned and whether effort is going to the highest-impact work.
Common mistakes
Confusing intention with allocation
Claiming something is a priority while giving it 10 cents of time reveals it isn't one in practice — the game exposes the gap.
Is it for you?
Best for
Managers and reports auditing whether an individual's time matches their stated priorities
Not ideal for
Situations needing team-level strategic prioritization rather than one person's time allocation
From the transcript
“we've just started trying something new called the $10 game for priorities”
“We started trying it out with your individual priorities”
“dividing up $10 where you're spending all of your time”
“we've sort of gotten down to like, I'm putting 10 cents here this week”
From the episode
Lessons from Atlassian: Launching new products, getting buy-in, and staying ahead of the competition
Megan Cook (head of product, Jira)