How to ruthlessly prioritize tasks to get more done

Checking items off your to-do list is a beautiful thing—but it's also easier said than done. The best way I've found to make sure you complete your tasks is through ruthless prioritization. And yes, sometimes that means deciding not to do things you'd really like to do—but it also means deciding what's the most important task even when everything on your list feels crucial.

If you can prioritize until you have only one thing to focus on right now, you can't help but get to work. Here are a few tips and techniques you can use to help prioritize your tasks.

• Consolidate all of your tasks

• Analyze your task list

• 6 prioritization methods to try

Consolidate all of your tasks into a single source

To-do items can come from a variety of sources: your boss sends you an email, you get a Slack message from IT, a bill arrives in the mail, or a coworker asks for a favor in the hallway. In order to prioritize your task list efficiently, you need a source-of-truth to-do list that contains all of the tasks you need to prioritize and complete from all of those sources.

Before you start prioritizing, pick a place for your source-of-truth to-do list. That place could be a to-do list app, your email inbox, Slack, a paper notebook, or even a spreadsheet app. It doesn't matter where you keep your list as long as it contains all of the tasks you need to complete.

If you go with a digital tool, you can use Zapier to automatically move incoming tasks from other sources to that list. Here are a few examples of workflows you can use, or you can create your own Zap to get the job done.

Once all of your tasks are on a single list, you can start analyzing and preparing to prioritize them.

Analyze your task list

Now it's time to go through your list, review each task, and decide what you want to do with it. Broadly speaking, you have four options:

• Do: complete the task now

• Defer: complete it later

• Delegate: assign it to someone else

• Delete: remove it from your list

Go ahead and do any task that will take less than two minutes to complete. That way, you quickly narrow down your list to include only complex, high priority tasks.

Delegation is another great way to quickly cut down your task list. Where possible, assign tasks to others—and if there's anything you're waiting on others for, consider deferring it to later. You can create a calendar reminder to follow up on it later or add it to a shared project; either way, taking it off your immediate task list will relieve the pressure of seeing it there all the time.

Finally, delete anything that you really don't need to do. For example, if a task has been on your to-do list forever, and you still haven't gotten around to it, maybe it's just not that important. You can also consider the relative impact a task will have: if it's high-effort but low-impact, consider removing it. 

Remember: deleting a task from your list doesn't have to be an irreversible, permanent action. You can defer tasks to a separate "someday" list of things you want to do if you ever find yourself with some extra time and energy. 

Once you're finished doing, delegating, deferring, and deleting tasks, what you have left is your actual workload. These are all things you need to do that will take longer than two minutes to complete. Now you're ready to start prioritizing.

6 methods for prioritizing your tasks

There are plenty of task prioritization techniques, and some may work better for you than others. Review the tactics below, pick the one that feels right, and then get started prioritizing your work.

1. Use a priority matrix

If you're a visual person, you might want to take all of your tasks and assign each a priority based on this priority matrix from Steven Covey:

Anything that's due soon (or overdue) counts as urgent. As for what's truly important and what's more of a "nice to do" task—that's up to you to decide, but try to be as honest as you can. In theory, you've already removed the truly unimportant work from your list by deleting or deferring those tasks, so you may need to consider how the remaining tasks map to company or team priorities in order to get a clearer picture of what matters most.

This tool is particularly helpful for those times when you're drowning in tasks, as it helps you visualize what's really important versus what can wait.

Once you've laid out your tasks on the grid, start by working on the urgent and important tasks first so you're not butting up against deadlines. Then you can focus on the most productive quadrant: not urgent and important. These are the tasks that are easy to put off but provide lots of value when they do get done.

And whatever you do, avoid the busy work and time wasters that land in the not urgent and not important quadrant as much as you can.

2. Use relative prioritization

Categorizing your tasks using a priority matrix helps, but what if you still have dozens of tasks in your urgent and important queue? How do you know where to start?

A helpful next step is to assign each task a priority number. If you have ten tasks, each task gets a number 1-10. You can't have two number ones, so this exercise forces you to weigh each task against the others in order to determine where to start first. For example, say your list consists of three items:

• File taxes (due today)

• Complete an assignment (due tomorrow)

• Put together a presentation (due next week)

By looking at all three tasks, it's clear that filing your taxes needs to be your #1 priority: it's the most urgent and the most high-impact, insofar as you can get in serious legal trouble for not filing your taxes on time. 

Prioritizing your other two tasks depends on context, and comparing your to-do items with each other often helps provide that context. Maybe the presentation isn't due until next week, but you know you'll need to request some data from another team for some of the slides. That might make it a higher priority than completing the assignment that's due tomorrow.

In these cases, it's also helpful to break your tasks down into smaller tasks to better understand how they stack up compared to one another. So instead of:

1. File taxes

2. Complete an assignment

3. Put together a presentation

You have:

1. File taxes

2. Request metrics for presentation

3. Complete an assignment

4. Put together a presentation

To-do list apps and Kanban apps that allow for drag-and-drop prioritization can be really helpful when using the relative prioritization technique. Instead of numbering your list, you can drag and drop tasks into priority order.

3. Make a prioritized task list for today

Assigning relative priorities works well if your task list is fairly static, but if you're adding several to-dos to your list every day, reprioritizing your list can quickly become a task in and of itself. If you have to manage a lot of incoming to-dos, it helps to make a prioritized task list each morning for the things you plan to do that day.

Look at your calendar and see how much time you think you'll have to devote to items on your task list today. Next, pick however many of the highest-priority tasks on your list that you think you can get through today. Ignore everything else you could be doing—until you're ready to plan tomorrow's list.

I like to include any calendar events on my "Today" list so I see an overview of my entire day and set my expectations accordingly. This method also prevents me from committing to too many tasks on days where I'm in meetings for hours.

Time-blocking apps are great for this exercise because they let you create a single to-do list and then drag and drop to-dos onto your calendar to schedule them into your day.

A good rule of thumb when planning your day is to underestimate how much you can get done and overestimate how long each task will take. It's much more productive—and rewarding—to check everything off your list for today than always move unfinished tasks over to tomorrow.

4. Focus on your Most Important Tasks (MITs)

"It's very simple: your MIT is the task you most want or need to get done today." – Leo Babauta, Zen Habits

If you're prioritizing your tasks each day and still struggling to get things done, try using the Most Important Tasks (or MITs) method. Choose a few (usually three) tasks to get done each day; those become your MITs.

When using MITs, anything else listed becomes a bonus, "nice to do if you have the time" task. You only work on bonus tasks if all your MITs are done—and if all you get through are your MITs, you've still had a successful day.

5. Pick a single thing to work on

Sometimes, you need to be a bit more extreme with your prioritization. When you look at your task list, pick a single thing to focus on that day. It could be one big task you really want to get done, or it could be a theme that relates to several of your tasks, like "increase sales." Choosing a single task or idea to focus on can be a good way to remind yourself to stay on track whenever you find yourself getting distracted.

You can also use a  Chrome extension like Momentum to reinforce this method; every time you open a new browser tab, the extension will remind you what your focus is for the day. You could also try a distraction blocking app to limit the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites—or to block them completely.

6. Find your 20% task

The Pareto principle states: you tend to get 80% of your results from 20% of your work.

It can be tricky to figure out which tasks fit in that 20% bucket, but once you do, you can apply the ultimate ruthless prioritization to your workday. Simply make that 20% work your priority—and your benchmark for a productive day.

I've found that a simple exercise can help me identify what work fits in that 20% bucket: first, ask yourself what you'd work on if you could only do three things today. Be ruthless; only pick three. Next, cut that down to two—and finally, just one. If you absolutely had to stop working after doing only one task, which would you do?

While this question can be tough to answer since we all have so many things to get through each day, I've found it's a good way to realize which of your tasks provides the most value.

For me, writing a new blog post would almost always be my 20% work since I get returns from writing in various ways—future SEO traffic, social shares, inbound traffic, more visibility for my personal brand and the site I'm writing for, and so on.

Prioritize ruthlessly

As you practice being ruthless with your to-dos, you'll find it gets easier, and you'll be able to pick the right method at the right time. And hopefully, you'll find that ruthlessly prioritizing tasks can actually be quite liberating.

Related reading:

• How to write SMART goals

• Why Google Sheets should be your to-do List

• How to convince yourself to start something (when you really don't want to)

• 5 daily scheduling methods to bring more focus to your day

• I'm anti to-do list—here's what I do instead

• How to gamify productivity

This article was originally published in June 2017. It has since had contributions from Jessica Greene and Hannah Herman. The most recent update was in August 2024.