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How to Prioritize When There's Always More To Do
Understanding importance over urgency
The Eisenhower Matrix system forces us to prioritize important tasks over urgent tasks.
Put your tasks in one of four separate categories:
- Urgent and Important tasks/projects to be completed immediately.
- Not Urgent & Important tasks/projects to be scheduled on your calendar.
- Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be delegated to someone else.
- Not Urgent & Unimportant tasks/projects to be deleted.
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Key Ideas
Learning how to prioritize...
...means getting more out of the limited time you have each day. It’s one of the cornerstones of productivity and once you know how to properly prioritize, it can help with everything fro...
Master lists
Capture everything on a Master List and then break it down by monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
- Start by making a master list—a document, app, or piece of paper where every current and future task will be stored.
- Once you have all your tasks together, break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
- When setting your priorities, try not to get too “task oriented” - you want to make sure you’re prioritizing the more effective work.
Eisenhower Matrix
The matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that answers that helps you separate “urgent” tasks from “important” ones:
- Urgent and Important: Do these tasks as soon as possible
- Important, but not urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and schedule it
- Urgent, but not important: Delegate these tasks to someone else
- Neither urgent nor important: Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible.
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Key Ideas
Productivity Shame
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The Busyness Paradox: Addicted To Being Busy
- Personal productivity is not about all-round efficiency, and it is wrong to think about your input as that of a machine in a factory unit.
- This is further complicated by our mistaken assumption that being in demand means that we are doing a splendid job.
- We blur our all boundaries between our work and personal life and every minute of the day is to be kept busy as we rush to attend every meeting, cross out every task from the to-do list or to answer every email that we get.
Completion Bias
Our brain starts to favour small tasks that give a false impression of productivity (woohoo! I just sent out fifty emails!) while we neglect the large, complex but meaningful tasks.
This is known as the completion bias.
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To-do lists can help perfectionists move past our paralysis. They may find making a list to be a reassuring guide to their day.
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Break down projects
... into manageable tasks.
This way, you're armed with a set of concrete actions to take rather a vague cloud of high expectations.
Define the next action
... rather than all subsequent steps.
Focusing only on the next action gives you permission to work on something even if you don’t have it all figured out—which is crucial to completing tasks that in the past have left you paralyzed.