P0–P4 is the incident priority ladder: incident priority from full outage 🚨 to low impact ☝️.

Priorities don’t just sort work — they decide what’s off-limits until it’s fixed.

🔴 P0 (Blocker): The system is down. Nothing else matters.

Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. Can’t go home. Everything else stops.

🟠 P1 (Critical): Business at risk. It must be solved, fast.

No meetings (except the war room). No refactors. Dinner is optional.

🟡 P2 (High): Important but not life-threatening.

No deep work, no experiments. Be ready to drop everything on ping.

🟢 P3 (Medium): Improvements, refactors, optimizations.

No guaranteed time. Bumped the second an alarm rings.

🔵 P4 (Low): The “someday” list.

No calendar slot. No air cover. Lives on the “someday” shelf.

👉 If this reads like your week, you’re running on urgency, not intent.

Protect basics (food, sleep, recovery), rotate on-call, and ring-fence P3/P4 time so you don’t live forever at the top of the list.

#poll #ITLeadership #OnCall #IncidentManagement #EngineeringCulture #Prioritization #SRE #DevOps