How did you handle a situation where priorities were constantly changing?

In my last internship, I was helping build an internal dashboard, and midway through the week a customer issue came up that made the team shift attention to improving one report first. I had been working on a different page, so instead of just switching blindly, I asked my mentor what outcome mattered most and whether I should pause completely or finish a small piece that would still be useful later. We agreed I would wrap up one small backend change, then move to the report issue. I sent a quick update in our team channel so people knew my original task would be delayed. To handle the uncertainty, I broke the new work into smaller steps and checked in the next day before investing more time. We got the report fix out that week, and my lead later said the updates helped because they always knew what I was working on and why.

At my first job on a small nonprofit’s website team, I was mostly helping with content updates and simple bug fixes, so I didn’t have a lot of control over the roadmap. During one month, our priorities changed almost every day because we were preparing for a fundraising campaign, then an accessibility issue came up, and then leadership asked for a landing page tweak based on donor feedback. I learned to start each morning by asking my manager what was most urgent and what could wait, instead of assuming my original to-do list still mattered. When something new came in, I’d quickly note where I left off, finish the smallest useful piece if I could, and then switch without letting tasks get half-done. I also kept a short running update in our shared doc so the team could see what had moved and why. That helped me stay calm during the changes, and my manager said it made me easy to rely on even when the schedule was messy.