prioritization

Saying no is easy and it costs you the relationship. The move that works is to make the queue visible, give the researcher something they control, and offer a smaller thing today. The three mechanisms that turn this from a recurring argument into a system.

Measure the hours before you rank anything, because the task that feels worst is usually not the one that costs most. The ordering rule that keeps automation from causing the outage it was meant to prevent, and why detection always ships before remediation.

The first move is not technical. It is deciding who runs what, because one person serially debugging three incidents is slower than three people in parallel and much slower than one person coordinating. The ordering rule, and the two things that outrank everything else.