Priorities Simplified Using These Sure Fire Mental Models

Prioritization starts with identifying your comparative advantage. Where you shine. The area you can generate the most value with the least effort. Concentrate on tasks and projects you excel at. They are here. This ensures you allocate your time to high-impact areas. Other rules tap into the same fundamental principle. Strengths-based thinking: align your tasks with your natural abilities. Circle of competence: prioritize tasks within your circle—the areas where you have expertise—to operate efficiently and effectively. Impact-effort matrix: evaluate and prioritize tasks based on potential impact and effort, aiming for the highest impact, lowest effort. The point remains: leverage your strong suits.

Thereafter, care for timing. Surf. Pick the right moment. Catch the right wave. Understanding when it’s best to do specific tasks—whether to leverage momentum or wait for optimal conditions—ensures you prioritize actions that align with the opportunity in the moment. This is kindred to the 80/20 rule or Pareto principle: identify and prioritize the high-leverage, top 20 percent of tasks that drive 80 percent of the results. Put them together: save time, avoid unnecessary effort, maximize outcomes.

While focus is essential, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Bad practice. Diversifying priorities stops you from being overly reliant on one area. You don’t want to go all in. Burning all your ships is pretty bad advice. By balancing your efforts, you reduce the risk of neglecting important aspects. These could be revelatory opportunities. Your plan becomes more resilient and you increase your luck surface area this way. Meaning your chances of running into rich opportunities escalate just by diversifying your priorities. Being laser-focused is fine. Seeing only one possible outcome is not.

Some tasks yield less benefit as you invest more effort. Diminishing returns and underlying concepts enables you to prioritize accordingly. Stop when you hit the point of reduced efficiency. Move to another task. Parkinson’s law plays right into this: work expands to fill the time available. More time at work does not mean more work done. Set deadlines. Limit your time. This forces you to focus on high-impact tasks and prevents inefficiency. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all.

Highlighting a similar idea is the false positives false negatives model. Misjudging priorities results in wasted effort. Sometimes you think things important when they really aren’t. Other times you overlook critical tasks. Avoid costly mistakes like these by concentrating on long-term success instead of short-term wins. That is, the global optimum. Prioritization is the art of maximizing short-term gains for long-term outcomes, after all. Your bullseye is serving the overarching goal while maintaining momentum and satisfaction.

Achieve that with velocity. Speed sucks. Without direction. A tortoise that knows the way will win the race over a cheetah running in circles any day. Velocity combines speed and direction. Prioritize momentum while staying in alignment with the long-term objective. Balance urgency and intentionality. That is the only way. Lean your ladder against the right wall before you climb.

Else you might pay a big price. Every yes is a no to a million other things. Every choice means prioritizing a task and sacrificing every other in the given moment. Constantly evaluate opportunity cost. This will change the way you see things. Promise. Over time, the results of prioritizing will snowball. You will tap into the compounding effect: small initial efforts and payoffs grow exponentially over time. Choose tasks with the possibility of compounding benefits. Leverage your strengths. Delegate or seek help for tasks outside your circle. Limit how long you take on projects. Know where you are going before you get going. If you do this consistently, you win.