Priority dispersion: the full plate
Your calendar is full, and the work is real. You revise the proposal on Monday, develop the course on Tuesday, handle the business idea on Wednesday, and return to the proposal after another interruption. Each project gets a little better. None has yet reached the point where someone else can use it, buy it, reject it, or respond to it.
This pattern is priority dispersion. Several viable targets divide a finite amount of attention. The person isn't idle and may have good reasons for keeping every project alive. The trouble appears over a longer interval: effort is visible everywhere, while consequential outcomes are scarce. The defining observation is the repeated gap between activity across targets and the external thresholds any one of them reaches.
Imagine a consultant with a workshop, a book proposal, and a new service. All three have outlines, research, and recent edits. The workshop has no date, the proposal has no recipient, and the service has no customer-facing page. This is a hypothetical example. It shows how effort can be distributed across several projects while their external milestones remain untouched.
The nearest neighbor is novelty redirection. With priority dispersion, the same projects remain in parallel. With novelty redirection, a fresh opportunity repeatedly displaces the selected one, often near a planned release. Priority dispersion also differs from simply having a demanding portfolio. Some roles require several concurrent commitments, and each may be reaching its own external milestones. A crowded week by itself says little.
Productive Stasis examines the gap between goal-related activity and external outcomes. Priority dispersion gives attention to the allocation of work across a portfolio. Research on procrastination often begins with a delayed focal task; a crowded portfolio may have no single focal task to delay. That is one reason to describe this pattern separately. See Steel's review of procrastination for the research on delayed intended actions.
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