Then, there was the thing where I would leave plastic syringe caps and bits of paper from wrappers in patients’ beds. This incurred approximately equal wrath to the med errors–in practice, a lot more, because she would catch me doing it around once a shift. I agreed with her on the possible bad consequences. Patients might get bedsores, and that was bad. But there were other problems I hadn’t solved, and they had worse consequences. I had, correctly I think, decided to focus on those first.

When I do this kind of triaging (the example that comes to mind first is learning competitive fighting games), I often (certainly not always) do end up trying to fix some of my lower-priority common mistakes at the same time, but just not caring about them as much. This often seems to make them easier to fix than if I had prioritized them, which seems related to the main point of your post.