How to Prioritize Work: 7 Practical Methods for When "Everything is Important"

...means getting more out of the limited time you have each day. It’s one of the cornerstones of productivity and once you know how to properly prioritize, it can help with everything from your time management to work life balance.

Capture everything on a Master List and then break it down by monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

1. Start by making a master list—a document, app, or piece of paper where every current and future task will be stored. 
2. Once you have all your tasks together, break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
3. When setting your priorities, try not to get too “task oriented” - you want to make sure you’re prioritizing the more effective work.

The matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that answers that helps you separate “urgent” tasks from “important” ones:

• Urgent and Important: Do these tasks as soon as possible
• Important, but not urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and schedule it
• Urgent, but not important: Delegate these tasks to someone else
• Neither urgent nor important: Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible.

Rank your work by its true priority with the Ivy Lee Method:

1. At the end of each work day, write down the 6 most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. 
2. Prioritize those 6 items  n order of their true importance.
3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the next one.
4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
5. Repeat this process every working day.

Instead of keeping all tasks on a single level of priority, this method offers two or more levels for each task:

• Go through your list and give every task a letter from A to E (A being the highest priority)
• For every task that has an A, give it a number which dictates the order you’ll do it in
• Repeat until all tasks have letters and numbers.

Once you’ve prioritized your most important work, it’s time to actually choose how to attack the day.

How you start the day sets the tone for the rest of it. And often, getting a large, hairy, yet important task out of the way first thing gives you momentum, inspiration, and energy to keep moving. 

Cut out “good enough” goals with Warren Buffett’s 2-list strategy.

Humans are especially susceptible to the “sunk cost fallacy”—a psychological effect where we feel compelled to continue doing something just because we’ve already put time and effort into it.

But the reality is that no matter what you spend your time doing, you can never get that time back. And any time spent continuing to work towards the wrong priority is just wasted time.