When everything is on fire, narrow to one fire and move

Your heart kicks when three problems arrive at once. Slack pings like popcorn, your manager asks for an update, and a customer reports an outage. The cursor blinks back at you while your phone buzzes on the desk. This is the moment when panic writes your plan, unless you write it first.

You take two slow breaths and say, quietly, “Outage, comms, deadline.” You scan the dashboards and see error rates spiking, a plausible rollback path, and ten unanswered messages. You choose the outage. A ten‑minute rollback would restore service and buy time. You DM your teammate, “Rolling back, status in 10,” and post the same in the incident channel. The noise level drops a notch.

The rollback completes, error rates fall, and your shoulders do too. You re‑run the loop: breathe, label, scan. Now the highest‑impact item is communication, so you post a brief update and next steps. You note the deadline, decide it can slip one hour, and tell your manager. It’s not perfect, but you’re steering. The screen glow softens as your nervous system catches up.

This is deliberate attention under stress. Breathing plus labeling reduces emotional hijack. Prioritize and Execute is a behavioral triage that respects limited cognitive bandwidth. Short sprints and status updates lower uncertainty for others, which lowers your own load. Rotating prevents target fixation, where you miss the shifting priority. It’s mindful leadership in 90‑second cycles.

When pressure spikes, take two slow breaths and name the three biggest problems to widen attention. Pick the one that, if improved in ten minutes, unlocks the most and run a short focused sprint on it. Tell the key people what you’re doing so they stop guessing. Then reassess, breathe again, and rotate your focus if something else has become the top fire. Keep looping until the environment calms. Try it the next time your notifications start piling up.