How to prioritize important tasks

When everything's a P1, nothing is.

No matter where you work, no matter what you do, your business has priorities. And almost certainly, it even has competing priorities. Essentially, there are lots of important things to get done, but finite resources available to accomplish them all. That’s business, and that’s life.

I’ve worked at startups and I’ve worked at huge companies. Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve encountered multiple, simultaneous top priorities. I’ve been on both sides of the negotiation between The Product Side and The Revenue Side, where the product team needs the revenue team to decide which is more important, Feature X or Feature Y — and the inevitable answer from the revenue team is that they’re both extremely important.

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And if it’s just two things on this hypothetical list, that’s remarkable: It’s frequently Feature X, Feature Y, Bug Fix Z, Rebrand A, New Copy B, and Additional New Feature C.

I’ve seen long lists of projects that are all stamped as P1, the highest priority. I’ve seen multiple P0s, where that zero is meant to represent a truly mission-critical feature without which we’re suffering immediate massive breakage. Multiple P0s!

When everything’s a P1 top priority, nothing is. So how do you handle it when there are multiple, competing top priorities?

(Fun fact: This is a question that I like to ask folks when I’m interviewing them for a job.)

Of course you can and should weigh what’s truly the most important thing, if there’s any advantage to specific sequencing, if one thing is truly more important than another. But the cold hard reality is that sometimes there are multiple things of equal importance, and they all have to get done, and they’re all super important. When you’re faced with those situations, how are you supposed to prioritize?

The answer is simple: You just pick one thing, and start working on it.

You’ve heard of analysis paralysis. I also want to warn you about prioritization procrastination. Sometimes there’s an instinct to get lost in the debate, weighing the pros and cons of the right ranking of tasks, devoting ever-increasing people-hours to the work of deciding what the work should be.

Don’t do that.

Pick a task, and start. Choose a project, and get to it. You can feel the stress and worry of the other project — or projects — that you’re NOT starting, but to what end? Start some work. It’s truly the only way.

And of course it’s extremely important to just pick one, not to keep wrestling with the decision over which. If you can’t pick one, give them all numbers and ask Siri or Alexa or Google to pick a number between one and n. Then just start.

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You’ve probably heard the axiom that the best time to plant a tree or start a project was a year ago. The second best time is right now.

When there are competing top priorities, you’re already behind. The only solution is to start working. When doing everything at once is impossible, the only option is to get to work. Pick a task, and know that when it’s finished, you’ll go on to the next one.