Those of you reading this blog, those interested in the pursuit of productivity and work-life balance, and all those nice things, probably have a lot of dreams. It’s something that binds us.
We want to be better in more than one area of our lives. There’s our health, our social lives, our personal work—and the personal work likely contains anywhere from four to eight subcategories and projects.
What are you gonna do, pick just one? No. Not if you don’t have to. And that’s the good news we bring you today: you don’t have to choose. It’s possible to have it all!
It just takes one magic word, and about a million ways to implement it: prioritization.
The following is an exhaustive encyclopedia of various methods for prioritizing your work.
It didn’t feel right to narrow this list down arbitrarily. So grab a pen and keep up—we have so much to cover. Peruse the list, choose your own adventure—see what will work best for you. The only important part is that you choose one.
The Master List
The first step feels like the most natural “no-brainer” of them all: capturing everything on a Master List and breaking it down into manageable goals.
Step 1: Brain Dump Your Tasks
Start by getting everything out of your head and into a document. This is your Master List, a brain dump of every task, project, and idea competing for your attention. Don’t worry about organization at this stage; just focus on getting it all down. You can use a simple tool like a piece of paper, a note-taking app, or a project management tool—whatever works best for you.
Step 2: Prioritize with Monthly, Weekly, and Daily Goals
Once you have your Master List, it’s time for our magic word: prioritize. Start by breaking your tasks down into three categories:
- Monthly goals: the big-picture objectives that provide real impact.
- Weekly goals: the tasks that need to be completed within the next, let’s say, seven or so days to move your monthly goals forward.
- Daily goals: the specific tasks you need to tackle today to make progress on your weekly goals.
This system comes from a productivity expert named Brian Tracy. He recommends that your daily tasks should be pulled from your weekly list, which is pulled from your monthly list. This ensures that your daily priorities are always aligned with your bigger goals.
This method also helps you avoid a typical red herring we can run into as we tackle our work: Completion Bias—the tendency to focus on finishing small, easy tasks rather than tackling larger, more complex ones. By working from your Master List, you can ensure that you’re always working on meaningful tasks that drive real progress.
It’s all about taking that chaotic to-do list (we all have one) and transforming it into a clear, actionable plan that helps you achieve your goals.
The Eisenhower Matrix
Now that you have your Master List, it’s time to separate the truly urgent tasks from the ones that are important but less immediately pressing. This is where the Eisenhower Matrix comes in—a simple but powerful tool for making prioritizing feel simple.
You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule. (It’s also known as The Pareto Principle.) This principle states that 20% of your efforts generate 80% of your results. Make that your new north star: look for tasks that drive real impact, rather than just checking boxes. This will help you as you dive into using the Eisenhower Matrix
Developed by—if you can believe it—Dwight Eisenhower himself, the matrix is a four-quadrant box that helps you categorize tasks into urgent vs. important. Urgent tasks, like certain emails or phone calls, demand immediate attention, while important tasks align with your long-term goals and values.
To prioritize tasks effectively, ask yourself which quadrant they fit into:
- Urgent and Important: Complete these tasks ASAP (e.g., deadlines, emergencies)
- Important, but not Urgent: Schedule these tasks (e.g., planning, strategy)
- Urgent, but not Important: Delegate these tasks (e.g., emails, meetings)
- Neither Urgent nor Important: Eliminate these tasks (e.g., busywork)
Once you have tasks nicely divvied up, consider delegating some of the work.
(This was a lot easier for someone like Eisenhower who had a staff working for him and, you know, was the President of the United States. But if you’re a member of a team in any sense of the word, this could still apply to you.)
Delegating tasks effectively does wonders for freeing up time and mental energy. Try these steps to start:
- Find the right person for the task
- Explain the task clearly
- Provide enough time and guidance for completion
- Follow the 30x rule: budget 30 times the task’s normal completion time for training
(For example, if a task takes 5 minutes to complete, budget 150 minutes for training and delegation. This may seem like a lot, but it saves you 1,100 minutes per year [5 minutes/day × 250 working days]).
Do this right, and you’ll be able to focus much more of your time on what we call high-impact tasks.
The Ivy Lee Method
When faced with a long list of urgent and important tasks, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. That’s where the Ivy Lee Method comes in—a timeless productivity technique that helps you rank your daily tasks. (And it’s my personal favorite method.) It’s surprisingly simple yet effective. Here’s how to deploy it:
- End your day with a clear plan: Write down the top six tasks you need to accomplish tomorrow. (You might be thinking six is a small number, but it’s more than enough)
- Prioritize with intention: Rank those six tasks in order of their true importance. Be honest with yourself—what really, truly needs to get done?
- Focus on one task at a time: Start with the first task and work on it until it’s complete. No multitasking or context switching!
- Move on to the next task: Once you’ve finished the first task, move on to the second one, and so on. (This is one of the hardest parts of the method)
- Roll over unfinished tasks: At the end of the day, transfer any unfinished tasks to a new list of six tasks for the next day.
- Repeat the process: Follow this routine every working day to stay focused and productive.
By limiting yourself to just six tasks per day, you’ll be forced to prioritize effectively and stay focused on what matters. This constraint helps you:
- Avoid becoming overwhelmed by decision fatigue
- Single-task your way through your list, reducing distractions and increasing productivity (in a way that feels super crisp and rewarding)
- Most importantly, make steady progress on your most important tasks
Give this one a try and let me know how it goes—it hasn’t failed anyone yet.
The ABCDE Method
While the Ivy Lee method is excellent for daily task prioritization, determining the “true importance” of each task can still be a challenge. That’s where the ABCDE method comes in—this one is great for separating tasks with similar priorities that require a more granular approach. Try this:
- Assign letters (A-E): Label each task with a letter from A (highest priority) to E (lowest priority).
- Add numbers for clarity: For tasks with the same letter, assign a number to indicate the order in which you’ll complete them (e.g., A1, A2, A3).
- Repeat the process: Continue assigning letters and numbers until all tasks have been prioritized.
This will hopefully help you gain a clearer understanding of each task’s true importance. This approach should help:
- Differentiate between tasks with similar priorities
- Create a more nuanced prioritization system
- Make informed decisions about which tasks to tackle first
Example:
- A1: Critical project deadline (high priority)
- A2: Important meeting preparation (high priority, but slightly lower than A1)
- B1: Respond to urgent email (medium priority)
- C1: Routine report generation (low priority)
Eat the Frog
You’ve heard of this one before—its name has that “you couldn’t forget even if you wanted to” quality, doesn’t it?
Now that you’ve prioritized your tasks, it’s time to tackle the most important one first. This approach, popularized by a French quote from one Nicolas Chamfort, can set a productive tone for the entire day—basically by getting the most unpleasant part over and done with first.
By tackling your most challenging task first, you’ll:
- Gain momentum and energy to tackle the rest of your tasks
- Build motivation and inspiration to continue pushing through your list
- Make meaningful progress on your most critical work
Research by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile confirms the benefits of starting your day with a small win. She oversaw a study that found that making progress on meaningful work is the single most important factor in boosting emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday
How to Apply the “Eating the Frog” Strategy
- Identify your Most Important or Most Challenging task for the day
- Schedule it as the first task in your day
- Focus on completing it without distractions or multitasking
- Celebrate your win and use it as motivation to tackle the rest of your tasks
This one can lead to some positive momentum that propels you forward into your day. See how it works for you.
Warren Buffett’s 2-List Strategy
Even with the best productivity habits, you could still be working towards the wrong goals. That’s why it’s essential to regularly reassess your long-term objectives and priorities. That’s where billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s 2-list strategy comes in.
- Write down your top 25 goals: Go crazy with this. Include life goals, career goals, education goals, or anything else you want to achieve.
- Identify your top 5 goals: Circle the five most important goals on that list. Be very intentional about your selection.
- Create an “Avoid at All Costs” list: Move the remaining 20 goals to a separate list. These are tasks that might seem important but aren’t aligned with your top priorities.
The third one might feel a little weird and aggressive. But by actively avoiding tasks that aren’t essential to your top goals, you’ll narrow your focus, and concentrate on what truly drives progress towards your long-term objectives. This is the time to get serious about how you allocate your time and energy.
Warren Buffett apparently used this strategy to help his personal pilot prioritize his career goals. By focusing on the most critical objectives, the pilot was able to achieve greater success and fulfillment.
Hey—if it works for him, right?
Schedule High-Priority Tasks During Peak Hours
To maximize your productivity, combine task and time priorities by scheduling your most important work during your most productive hours.
Everyone experiences natural fluctuations in energy and focus throughout the day, known as their productivity curve. By identifying your peak productive times, you can optimize your schedule for maximum impact. Lucky for you, we here at RescueTime happen to make a lovely product that can help you with exactly that.
RescueTime runs in the background as you work, and before long provides you with in-depth reports on your work habits.
With that info, you can analyze your energy levels, focus, and motivation throughout the day. Then, you can identify the times when you’re most productive and focused. Once you’ve identified your peak productive times, schedule your highest-priority tasks accordingly. This will help you make the most of your energy and focus and complete critical tasks efficiently
- Use your most productive hours for tasks that require intense focus, creativity, or problem-solving.
- Break larger tasks into smaller, manageable chunks to maintain momentum.
- Avoid scheduling meetings or non-essential tasks during peak productive times.
Take our word for it: understanding your productivity curve and scheduling high-priority tasks during peak hours is a powerful way to supercharge your productivity.
Billionaires and Presidents
Okay, so that was a lot to take in. But it was also motivating, right? All these people that seem to have it all figured out.
It’s a prime example of a topic with so much literature and thought already dedicated to it. Other smart and impressive people— billionaires and presidents among them—have already done the hard work of developing systems, having other systems fail on them, and finally settling on their perfect plans. Safe to say, after thousands have tried them out, you can trust them.
All you have to do is pick one, commit, and get to work.
Have fun out there. Do the important stuff first.
