Everything is a priority: Nothing is a priority

Priority: one thing that is more important than everything else.

The word priorities didn’t even exist in the English language until hundreds of years after the word priority was introduced.

Using the above definition of priority as the starting point, let’s examine how you can reshape your work by focusing on the most important thing.

What if I can’t identify what is most important?

This is the common challenge. Of course, there will always be more than one thing you need to complete. Priority isn’t always dictated by timeline, but that can be a major factor. Instead of creating a schedule based on due dates (not real prioritization), let’s focus on how you can better identify and prioritize your work.

Your priority is always the one thing you need to finish now. You can have multiple tasks, but only one is the priority.

Here are some common issues leaders face that make it harder for them to understand and identify their one priority task.

1. Business acumen. You need to understand your role, the goals of your organization, the adjacent departments & their work, as well as the abilities of your team, to name just a few things that go into business acumen. Developing more knowledge and awareness of how your work contributes to the larger organization can help you identify the most important task for you & your team to work on in relation to the broader business goals.

2. Complexity. The more challenging & longer your projects are, the harder it will be to understand how to prioritize each subordinate task. You may work on project X for 3 hours before you hit a critical step that requires you to shift focus to priority Y for 2 hours. Then maybe you go back to X, or you switch again to a new project Z. As the complexity of your role increases, you will have more interconnected projects and tasks, making it more difficult to choose the most important thing at the moment.

3. Environment & Leadership. Let’s face it, some leaders aren’t willing to budge, and they give you 3 top priorities expecting that you and your team can handle them. In this instance, you’ll need to rely on your own knowledge to appropriately assign and prioritize work so it doesn’t become chaotic, working on three priorities at once. I implore you to reconsider if you’re the leader who likes to set multiple priorities.

The Solution

1. Work on one thing at a time. Suppose you work on fewer projects per day, but put in more effort and focus on each one. In that case, you’ll accumulate more output as if you frantically moved from project to project throughout the day, even though you’ll actually be working on fewer different things each day. This method only works if you can identify the one thing you need to be doing at each moment of the day.

2. Make progress and move on. Working on one aspect of a project does not mean completing the entire project. It means developing a standard cadence that allows you to finish long-term projects by working on them a few hours each day. Understanding when to move to the next project is a direct reflection of knowing your priority and what constitutes completion of the priority task (most often not completion of the entire project).

3. Develop your business acumen. Talk to other leaders, observe other roles, and ask to learn more about the business model, financials, and long-term company goals. The more you know about your organization, the easier it is to add value and work on the things that actually matter.

By identifying the most important thing to do each hour of the day, you can create a fairly simple process for yourself that allows you to control your day, add value to your organization, and escape the chaos of having multiple priorities.

Just think: what’s the most important thing for me to do right now?