How Can You Prioritize When Everything Seems Important?

As a business owner or leader, often everything on your plate feels important. Employees, customers, revenue, expenses, compliance, products, services, family, home…

It’s no wonder people often feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

But trying to tackle it all leads to burnout and inefficiency.

You know you need to prioritize, offload, and decommit – because you really can’t do everything.
But again, if everything seems important, that feels like an impossible task.

Enter your 3-step framework to get rid of overwhelm and get your most important tasks done.

But first, why do we get into this situation… because we all do.

Why Do We Struggle with Prioritization?

These are the things my clients tend to share:

Step 1: What Are Your Priorities (Not Just Tasks)

You may have a lot of tasks on your To Do list. But not all of them are really priorities.

True priorities align with your values, goals, and impact.

How do you figure out what those are? Ask yourself:

Example: If growing your business is the goal, client acquisition tasks take priority over answering non-prospect emails.

Step 2: Use a Simple Prioritization Framework

There are lots of good frameworks out there. These are a few of my favorite because they’re easy for my clients to understand and they’re effective.

The Eisenhower Matrix: Urgent vs. Important

This is a tool, developed by General Eisenhower in World War II. It is a 4-quadrant graph that helps you separate what truly needs your attention by putting items into Important or Urgent categories.

The Quadrants:
Urgent, Important → Do it now (crises, major deadlines)
Important, Not Urgent → Schedule it (strategic planning, networking)
Urgent, Not Important → Delegate it (admin tasks, routine emails)
Neither Urgent nor Important → Eliminate it (busywork, distractions)

Action Step: Take your task list and place each item into a quadrant. Then, as a best practice, schedule in, and HOLD DEAR, the Important, Not Urgent items.

Look, if it’s important and urgent, you’ll do it. Naturally. But what about, for instance, that book you keep wanting to write to help you get speaking gigs and market your business? It’s definitely important. But it’s big, will take a lot of work, and no one is pushing you do it. It’s important, but it’s not urgent. That means, you’ll need to make room for it.

Like starting each day spending 15 minutes on it.

But it also requires you to do address the other two boxes… delegate what you don’t need to do but does need to get done. Or, if you can’t yet delegate, at least save those items for your least productive time of day. Do them then. Don’t use up your creative, productive time with these kinds of tasks.

And just don’t do, and take off your list, anything in the fourth box.

The 80/20 Rule (Pareto Principle)

This rule says 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts.

So, identify the 20% of tasks that bring the biggest impact — and prioritize those first.

Example: If 20% of your clients generate 80% of your revenue, focus on serving, upselling, or attracting similar clients.

Or if LinkedIn generates 80% of your qualified leads, but you’re spending a lot of time on Instagram… why? Focus on where your leads are coming from. Spend time there.

The “One Question” Filter

When faced with multiple priorities, ask: “If I could only complete ONE thing today that moves me forward, what would it be?”

This forces you to focus on the highest-impact task.

Then you know you’ve done the most important thing already, and anything else you get done the rest of the day is gravy.

Step 3: Put Together Your Plan and Take Action

One of my favorite tools for planning comes from Cal Newport – Time Blocking.

Time block the priorities with the highest impact.

For example, start your day with your deepest work (your non-urgent but important tasks), the stuff you need a fresh brain and high creativity for (if you’re a morning person – if not, put this wherever in your day you are usually on fire).

Time block that hour or two into your calendar and don’t allow that time to be taken.

Next, think about what time of day you feel least productive… that’s the time to block off an hour to deal with those urgent but not important items, if you can’t delegate them.

Or you can call this “chaos” time – leave some time on your calendar to handle things that pop up and need to be dealt with.

Then, put your top three priorities for the rest of the day right at the top of your calendar. Those are your only “to do” list for the day.

You’ve set your calendar for the day. Depending on your situation, you may have only scheduled yourself for three or four hours because you already know the rest of the day is filled with meetings, family interruptions, and other commitments.

No matter: you’ve got the most important things you need to do covered.

If people try to steal any of that time, get good at saying No. Or saying Not Today. If it’s Important, you can work it into a future day.

Is saying No hard? Try “I’d love to help, but my schedule is full this week.” Or “Let’s revisit this next week or next month, when I can give it more of my attention.”

Prioritization Gives You More Focus and Less Stress

You CAN do anything — but not everything. And you shouldn’t even try.

Prioritization is about choosing what truly matters and letting go of the rest.

Action Step: Apply one prioritization method today and see how much more clarity and focus you gain!

And if you’d like some help figuring out what to focus on to hit your goals, set up a 15-minute clarity call with me. We can take a look at what’s going on and discuss how to help you reach your goals.