A few years ago, a friend invited me to ride along with him and his flight instructor in a little four-seater Cessna 172 for a flying lesson. He was working on his private pilot’s license at the time, and knowing my interest in aviation, he figured I’d enjoy tagging along for a ride to nowhere in particular. It wasn’t until we got to the airport that I learned what skill his instructor was planning to focus on that day:

Stall recovery.

I knew enough about flying to know that I was in for an interesting and slightly terrifying day, especially in the motion-intensifying back seat of a small plane.

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As I write this, a large part of the city and state around me are without power; for many people, it’s been like this for multiple days.

The state of Texas has had a major blackout in the midst of a historic winter storm. My family slept through two very cold nights in our house without electricity or heat, waking up to indoor temps of 45ºF (7ºC) after the overnight low here in Austin plunged to a historic 7ºF (-14ºC). (For context, Austin’s average overnight low for February is 46ºF (7ºC), and freezes rarely last more than a few hours.) My family is only warm now because we made a risky drive on treacherous, hilly roads to get to relatives who’ve remained with electricity.

As a self-proclaimed student of disasters, this is the first time I’ve found myself living through one. It’s been terrifying at times. In situations where I don’t have a lot of control, my coping mechanism tends to be information acquisition, so I’ve learned more in the last 72 hours than anyone could ever want to know about power generation and distribution in the state of Texas. As always, there are some amazing lessons here for those of us who lead software engineering teams.

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Serving in a leadership role increases the difficulty by requiring you to prioritize not just for yourself, but to help your team prioritize as well. Prioritization is persistently hard because the list of things you or your team could work on is always so much longer than the actual amount of work you have time to do. There are so many different ways you could sort your to-do list that it always feels like the one you’ve chosen must be wrong somehow.

Prioritization is so challenging that there’s a whole cottage industry of books and tools out there that try to make the process easier. Approaches like David Allen’s Getting Things Done and the Eisenhower Matrix as popularized by Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People can help you strategize around picking the right next thing to work on, and software like Todoist and Things offer tools to implement those systems.

These tools are great and the strategies they provide can definitely be helpful, but they really only help you sort and track your work at a surface level. As you progress in your career, though, this surface-level prioritization will no longer be enough. As your responsibilities grow and your to-do list further outstrips your capacity, you’ll need to understand what makes certain work more valuable in order for you to prioritize. So, how can you do this?

The answer is leverage.

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