At the World Wide Developers Conference of 1997, Steve Jobs was asked why he killed off OpenDoc, an ambitious Apple project.
His answer gives us a crucial lesson about task prioritization.
“Good engineers, lousy management... People were going off in 18 different directions, all doing interesting things, but it didn't add up.
We had to decide, what direction do we want to go in?”
He concludes:
“When you think about focusing, you think, focusing is about saying ‘yes’. No. Focusing is about saying ‘no’... and when you say ‘no’ you piss people off.”
It’s a fascinating video which lays out what made Steve Jobs truly great:
His ability to focus on the important, and ruthlessly cut everything else. He was world-class at prioritizing his tasks.
=> He realized that making small progress in many different directions is a lot LESS efficient than making a lot of progress in the most important one.
Obviously, this isn’t just a skill for Apple CEOs. It’s something we need to be good at in our careers, too.
So today I’m gonna share a few ways I like to prioritize my work.
Let’s go.
🔲 The Eisenhower matrix
As supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during WW2, and later as president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower knew a thing or two about getting things done.
Here’s his philosophy:
“I have two kinds of problems. The urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
This spawned the so-called ‘Eisenhower Matrix’:
I use this all the time. Steal it too. When you’re writing down your to-dos or planning your week, bucket your tasks into the matrix. Take these examples:
- Client presentation tomorrow → Urgent and Important. You've got a deadline, and it's a big deal for your career. Should be at the top of your to-dos.
- Brainstorming call for a project due next month → Important, not Urgent. Ask your team to reschedule the meeting for next week.
- Reply to routine emails → Urgent, Not Important.
- Reply to that ungrateful person who keeps asking for favors and makes it sound like it’s important for you → Not urgent nor important. Delete! (Or as Steve Jobs puts it, you’ve got to say No.)
To apply this right away, take your current to-do list and sort each task into these four buckets. Chances are you’ll find at least one thing you can ditch, and something important that deserves your full attention today.
☝️ What’s your 1 thing?
Gary Keller explains this beautifully in The 1 Thing, which I’ll summarise here:
The 80/20 principle says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions/activities. If that’s the case, then 20% of your 20% will give you 80% of your 80%. (Following the maths, 4% of your activities give you 64% of your results.)
To find out the 4% activity which gives you the most bang for your buck, ask Keller’s focusing question:
“What’s the 1 thing I could be doing right now/today/this week/this month/this year such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier and/or unnecessary?”
Let’s get practical:
- If you’re a mid-level marketing manager, maybe the “1 thing” this quarter is improving the conversion rate on your main product’s landing page. Nailing that might drive more revenue than any number of routine tasks you handle.
- If you’re a software engineer, maybe it’s focusing on building a feature that solves the biggest customer pain point, rather than getting sidetracked by minor bug fixes.
Once you identify this “1 thing,” block time for it. Protect that time fiercely. Treat it as sacred, and watch how it moves you forward more than all your “busy” work combined.
🕐 “Operation Moneysuck”
In an issue of marketing legend Gary Halbert’s famous newsletter, he suggested his readers undertake “Operation Moneysuck”:
Focus on the one thing you’re good at, which generates money for your business, and delegate everything else.
Applied to our careers:
What’s the one thing you’re good at, which your career depends on, and how can you delegate/minimize/not do everything else?
Maybe you’re great at doing sales calls and closing deals. Instead of spending time prospecting and finding email addresses, see if you can delegate it to an assistant, automate it with simple tools, or batch it for one dedicated hour a week so it stops distracting you.
If you can’t delegate, try to automate less important tasks. Set up email filters, use templates, or schedule recurring blocks of time for low-level tasks so they don’t eat into your creative hours.
Think about a typical day: Are you spending two hours formatting slides when your best skill is strategy and relationship-building? That’s not good. Shift that formatting elsewhere, and spend those two hours doing what you do best.
🎯 Define what winning is
It’s very easy to chase productivity, then realize at the end you’ve been going in the wrong direction. So no task prioritization tip is complete without asking, what’s actually important to you?
Where do you want to be 18 months from now? With more money? More freedom? More security? More time to start a family?
If your goal is a promotion, focus on projects that showcase leadership and strategic thinking. If your goal is more flexibility, prioritize tasks that help you build a portfolio of work that can lead to remote-friendly roles.
There’s that old cliché of getting to the top of the ladder only to find out it’s leaning against the wrong wall. Don’t let this be you.
Take 10 minutes today to ask yourself: “If I achieved my top three career goals in 18 months, what tasks would have gotten me there?” Let that inform what you prioritize now.
⚙️ Build “Career Assets” that keep paying off
Let’s add another dimension: longevity.
Some tasks pay dividends long after you’ve done them, essentially giving you “career assets” that keep working for you over time.
For example:
- If you’re in marketing, instead of just sending out another one-off campaign email, create a reusable template or a mini “playbook” that you can apply to future campaigns.
- If you’re a project manager, document a process that your team struggles with. Turning that messy handover procedure into a clear checklist means you never have to reinvent it again. It keeps delivering benefits each time it’s used.
- If you’re a sales manager, record a short internal training video on handling the most common objections. Now every new team member learns from it, freeing you up to focus on bigger deals while still influencing the team’s success.
It’s all about creating systems, templates, and resources that will save you hours in the future!
