My suggestion is a flag like the town banner or the safety standard.
Let’s say you have a certain task that has to be done for, for example, town safety reasons (digging a moat, fencing off a passageway, etc.), but they think other things are more important, and the job just doesn’t get done.
Then you can place this flag near the task to tell your hearthlings that this is top priority.
It is really meant for emergency though, all hearthlings (or an amount that normally would be more than enough) that are able to finish a part of the job will abandon what they are doing to finish that task, and you can only have one top priority flag out at once.
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hmm… unless i totally misunderstood what you want (which is possible, i havent had coffee yet) isnt this kind of what the therapy ui does with the “Suspend” buttons?
at least they were put in so that if you urgently needed your hearthlings to finish a house, but they were all mining or collecting stuff you could temporarily suspend all other tasks but building and everyone would go build the house you needed done.
does that make sense?
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i did wonder where that option was for 
While that covers many cases, I did wish for a special button when a Hearthling is about to starve and needs a ladder, since that would be affected by disabling building via therapist, too. Then again, the amount of micromanagement required to pause a building temporarily maybe doesn’t warrant an extra feature.
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hmm… i thought ladders were part of “job” in the therapist… paging @yshan, what does building ladders get considered as in the therapist UI?
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Only now got around to test this. And omg, you’re right, I stand corrected. Thanks for the info.
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I thought of something very similar although our implementation methods differ a bit. I was thinking we could get a UI display of current tasks in progress and given the ability to flag priority jobs individually. Just a thought.
Wasn’t there in a very early alpha the feature to mark/highlight some area as higher priority? so hearthlings would prefer to collect the items located in this area or the building processes in this area? This is something i think the OP would like to see… me too if totally honest. Indirect management of the hearthlings can be somewhat frustrating at times.
I don’t remember the early Alphas very well cuz these earliest alphas were more like tech demos:
“Hey we implemented bushes! Look! They harvest berries and eat them!” or
"Hey we can build walls without roofs! The roof is visible in builder mode but they won’t do it yet." 
Was great to see all that features amass and come together to the great versions we have today though.
Yes, this is what I meant.