How to prioritise tasks in different areas of your life

To prioritise tasks across the different areas of your life, like work, a side business and home, start with two questions for each one: how urgent is it, and how important is it? Do what is both first, plan what is important but not urgent, and let the rest wait. Then watch for two quieter forces that pull you off course: how easy a task is, and how exciting it feels.

That second part is the one most advice leaves out, and in my experience it is the one that actually decides what gets done on a busy Monday.

Start with urgent and important

There is a well known way of sorting tasks called the Eisenhower matrix. You put every task into one of four boxes:

• Urgent and important: do it now.
• Important, not urgent: decide when you will do it.
• Urgent, not important: hand it off if you can, or keep it quick.
• Neither: let it go.

It works. If you only did this, you would already be ahead of most people. The trouble is that knowing what you should do and doing it are two different things.

What the Eisenhower matrix misses: easy and exciting

From Jonathan: Yes, we should prioritise on importance and urgency. But what we often neglect, or pay too much attention to, is how easy something is. If something is easy to do, we will naturally do it.

There are two more things going on with every task:

• How easy or difficult it is.
• How exciting or boring it is.

Put those two together on a grid and you can see what I call the Hidden Pull: the way we drift from hard, boring tasks towards easy, exciting ones.

I tend to gravitate towards what is exciting, not what I should actually be doing. And what I should be doing is often the stuff that in my head is not exciting. Things I have done a hundred or a thousand times before. Taxes are not exciting. But there comes a point where they have to be done.

So on a busy day I can easily spend the morning on things that are exciting and easy, feel productive, and still have the important, boring, harder thing sitting there untouched.

Why the hard, boring jobs get buried

Everyone has examples of this when they think about it. A job you knew was coming, that you kept pushing back, and then it was suddenly urgent and landed on top of everything else. Not because you forgot, but because you buried your head in the sand a little.

It is not a character flaw. Easy and exciting just win the moment-to-moment battle, every time, unless something pushes back.

How I prioritise a busy Monday

From Jonathan: This is why I think having a system that works for you is a way to push against that.

Here is what that looks like in practice:

1. Get the overview first. Before doing anything, look at everything with a date across work, the business and home, soonest first. Urgency is now decided for you.
2. Pick the important one. From what is due or coming up, choose the one thing that matters most today, whichever part of life it is in.
3. Name the boring one. Ask which task you are quietly avoiding because it is hard or dull. That is usually the one that turns urgent next.
4. If you keep avoiding it, break it down. Write the first small steps, including the hidden ones like finding the right folder or login. I wrote more about that in how to organise your life when you have too many things going on.
5. Use easy and exciting as the reward. Let yourself do the fun, easy things after a step of the boring one, not instead of it.

This might not suit you if

If your days are mostly one kind of work with a manager setting the order, you may not need any of this. It helps most when you are juggling separate areas, like a job, a side business and home, and nobody else is deciding what comes first.

Frequently asked questions