How to Be a Prioritization Master and Accomplish Massive Goals.

Set priorities for your day. This is fundamental productivity advice. And it sounds simple.

But it’s surprisingly deep.

As part of my VIP group, we’re doing a four week deep dive. A very deep dive. And so I’m reflecting the difference between merely writing down priorities and being a prioritization master.

What are the subtleties and details that matter? I think there are six fundamental areas to consider.

#1. The habit is not the goal.

The habit is to write down your priorities. But the goal is to have an accomplished day.

That’s what makes this a deep subject. Did you complete your priorities? Where they the right priorities? What did you accomplish as a result of these priorities?

#2. Which system is right for you?

Off the top of my head, I know of several systems for writing your priorities.

There’s 1–3–5, where you break down your day into the most important thing, the next three most important things, and then finally the five next.

There’s the One Priority method, which to my mind is real prioritization. There’s always one thing each day that matters so much more than everything else. Don’t muddy your day with tasks that don’t matter.

There’s the Ivy Lee method of six daily priorities which dates all the way back to Charles Schwab and Bethlehem Steel.

Last, in my list, is an unnamed method that comes from early 37Signals writing, “We don’t keep a prioritized bug backlog because at any moment we always know what the top ten bugs are — they’re the ones customers are yelling about.” There’s a lot of common sense in this method.

The thing about these methods is that they point to a truth: there is no one-size-fits-all prioritization method.

Each method differs primarily along two situational axis: your psychology and the relative value of the tasks you’re choosing from.

#3. Evaluating value with unknowable outcomes?

My life experience has me gravitate to the 37signals “just do the obvious work” outlook.

So often, the outcome of your work is unknowable. So researching and evaluating options becomes a false optimization.

But that’s not always true.

One of our sales coaches uses a boolean system. Is it a revenue generating activity (RGA)? If you have direct revenue responsibility, you’ll find yourself saying no to a lot more things just because they aren’t RGA.

In simple situations, the Coach.me team will do a 2x2 matrix that’s almost always organized around difficulty and value. When we do this, we almost always end up with a grouping of tasks that are “easy and very valuable.” Obviously, do those!

Prioritizing can actually get quite a bit more complicated— I’ve seen versions of the 2x2 matrix blow into 10x10 matrixes with weighted values. Obviously, that’s something that has to be done in Excel — not your head or a whiteboard.

#4. Did you have time to finish your priorities?

One of the main psychological benefits of a healthy prioritization system is that it lets you comfortably say no to the things that don’t matter and/or you don’t have time for. You don’t want guilt for those hanging over your day.

But, most of us still get over ambitious.And we end the day with work undone.

I think that failure is basically built into the 1–3–5 system. Some number of your final five small priorities almost always get missed. But at least you know you did the most important, #1, task.

There are two philosophies for handling scope.

One is to switch to reality based estimations. The problem with most estimations is that they start with “How long do I think this will take?”

And then your brain translates that into, “How fast do I think the most baller version of myself could complete this under optimal conditions?”

So the switch is to reframe the question, “Historically, how long have projects of similar size taken to complete?”

The other way to approach this is to realize that almost all work has a flexible version of done. For example, I could wrap this blog post up in a couple of sentences and just say, “That’s all I have time to write today.” (Instead I wrote two more sections.)

This is a time boxing strategy. A good way to handle this is to put every priority directly into your calendar. Along with organizing your day, this has the benefit of showing you clearly what work you’re not going to do.

#5. Did you follow your priorities?

No.

You did something else instead. You got pulled into someone else’s emergency. You read arguments on the internet. You did work that seemed more fun.

There’s a lot going on here.

We all deal with procrastination. Here’s a way to overcome it.

We don’t have complete control of our day. How do we deal with interruptions? This is why historical estimations work — they take into account that you are often interrupted.

Sometimes we just plain don’t want to do the work. And that’s because we have been brainwashed to prioritize work based on external factors rather than internal factors.

#6. Were they the right priorities?

You set your priorities, followed your own plan, and got your work done. Can you pat yourself on the back? Not necessarily.

The point of priorities is to produce accomplishments.

In Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup, he talks about alternative methods of innovation accounting. So many innovations go wrong that you have to measure something other than completion or success.

In other, more concrete jobs you can sometimes measure your work more directly. In sales, how many calls did you make? Did your close rate change?

But for many of us, it’s hard to know. Some people rigorously set a measurable hypothesis at the beginning of their work. I have a preference for a more observational mindset, as in, did any good come of this work even if it was in an area that surprised us?

The other way to answer this question is to consider opportunity cost. There’s a book, which my math-inclined brother-in-law loves, Principles of Product Development Flow.

Early in the book, the author tells an anecdote about a conversation with his editor.

“My editor told me that the number of mathematical equations in a book has an inverse correlation with sales. I ignored him.”

This book goes into great depth about queue theory in product development and comes to a very clear observation: you need slack in your day.

Quite often, setting priorities comes with a mindset of optimizing every second of your day. And, this author makes a very clear case that full utilization always leads to inefficiency.

All of that is to say that the topic of setting priorities is extraordinarily complicated even if the act is quite simple.

These are the topics that I enjoy covering in depth in the Coach.me VIP group. This is a paid group of thoughtful, high-achieving people who are passionate about reaching the highest levels of performance. It’s a paid group, although you can try it out for a week with the code PRIORITYVIP.