Being busy and priorities

There is a busy professional like us. He is in an important client meeting and starts getting calls from unknown numbers. He keeps ignoring them. In a while he gets a call from his friend. He picks up the phone and says I am in a meeting right now, plz call later. The friend says "mother fell in the bathroom got hurt at the back of her head. She is hospitalized now, would you come over?" He says, "so sorry to hear. I am in an important meeting right now, need to visit another client later, may be late evening I will visit your mother." The friend says, "it's your mother who is hospitalized, not mine. Your neighbors have been trying to get in touch with you for so long!" No need to say how terrible the professional feels and rushes to the hospital cancelling all his "important" work to prioritize attending to his mother.



To come back to our professional life, all of us seem to be always busy, sprint commitments, release pressures, meetings and so on to attend to many important things for e g ensuring acceptance criteria is well written, code quality is right, code reviews are done well, retrospectives happen regularly and action items are worked upon, test cases are written etc. We feel we are very busy sprinting and we don't have time to look at now. We ignore signs like regression defects or other minor issues like the person above ignored the  calls from unknown numbers. We prioritise things only when some escalations happen.

The point is nobody is really very busy, it's all about priorities. So let us all like good scrum citizens get our priorities like quality, value delivery, inspecting and adapting right. Everything else will fall in place.