To-do lists look deceptively simple. Most leaders keep one in a notebook, in an app, or scattered across sticky notes. But a to-do list without prioritisation is just a catalogue of guilt. And in the fast-paced reality of agency and consultancy life, your job isn’t to get everything done. It’s to get the right things done.
Leaders come to me with the same frustrations:
“My list keeps getting longer.”
“I tick off the small things but never make a dent in the big projects.”
“I don’t know what’s most important anymore.”
The issue isn’t capability or effort. It’s focus. Without clear prioritisation, you spend your day reacting to emails, client feedback, shifting briefs, and team questions - but still finish with the sense that nothing meaningful has moved.
As Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism, says: “If you don’t prioritise your life, someone else will.”
If you’d rather listen, I also explore this topic in Episode 56 of my podcast, How to Lead.
Why your to-do list feels overwhelming
A lot of leaders’ lists are more like guilt journals: long, unruly, and full of tasks that have been copied across for weeks. They don’t create clarity. They drain energy.
A list should be a decision-making tool - not a record of everything in your head, but a way to identify what matters most right now.
A study from Wake Forest University found that simply writing tasks down reduces intrusive thoughts about them. Getting things out of your head genuinely makes you calmer and more focused. But writing them down is only the first step. What matters is how you organise them.
The traps most leaders fall into
Across hundreds of coaching conversations, the patterns are consistent:
Everything feels urgent: Client work, pitch rehearsals, delivery issues - urgency becomes a default state
Urgent gets confused with important: Slack messages feel productive. Strategic work gets postponed
Delegation without priority: You hand tasks to your team, but without clarity on what matters most. That’s how people end up spinning plates
The endless scroll: A giant list of 73 items with no order
The dopamine chase: Ticking off easy tasks while avoiding the meaningful ones
The disappearing act: Writing lists but never looking at them - or rewriting them daily without progress.
Linda - our classic bad manager - does all of these. She treats every task like it’s on fire, and unsurprisingly, her team does the same.
Leadership needs the opposite approach: clarity, sequencing, and honest prioritisation.
Prioritisation is a leadership skill
Prioritisation is not admin. It’s a leadership act. It means making choices, often uncomfortable ones. You can’t do everything, and neither can your team. Clarity about what matters most protects time, energy, and attention for the work that actually moves the business.
So how do you turn a messy list into something that actually supports you?
Step 1: Brain dump, then sort
Start by getting everything out of your head - everything from “finalise budget forecast” to “buy dog food.”
Then sort it. This is where frameworks help.
Step 2: Choose a prioritisation framework that works for you
Different leaders prefer different tools. Use the one that helps you think most clearly.
The Eisenhower Matrix
A classic urgent/important tool.
Urgent & important: do it now
Important, not urgent: plan it
Urgent, not important: delegate it
Neither: delete it
The leadership insight: the “important, not urgent” quadrant is where strategic work lives. If you don’t make time for it, your leadership becomes reactive.
Impact vs effort grid
For each task, ask:
What’s the impact?
How much effort?
Then categorise:
High impact, low effort: prioritise soon
High impact, high effort: schedule properly
Low impact, low effort: quick wins
Low impact, high effort: challenge why it’s there
One client shifted from starting his day with emails (low impact, low effort) to client strategy calls and investor updates (high impact, moderate effort). The change was immediate.
The 1–3–5 rule
Each day:
1 big thing
3 medium things
5 small things
It forces realistic planning instead of aspirational lists that guarantee frustration.
The “Hell Yes” test
From Derek Sivers: “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”
This is vital for leaders drowning in opportunities and requests. If it doesn’t move the dial, why is it still on your list?
Step 3: Limit the daily list
Research suggests we can only focus on 3–5 meaningful tasks a day. More than that, and you set yourself up to feel behind before the day even starts.
So keep a Master List.
But each morning, create a Today List with just three priorities.
If you finish them, brilliant. If you don’t, you still know you were working on what mattered most.
Step 4: Sequence your priorities
Prioritisation isn’t just choosing what matters. It’s choosing when it matters.
Eat the frog: do the hardest or most important thing first.
Energy mapping: schedule your highest-value work when your focus is sharpest. For many leaders, that’s the morning
Include recovery: reflection, rest, and boundaries are also priorities. Leaders who don’t protect them burn out
Step 5: Time-box your work
Vague items like “work on presentation” expand endlessly.
Instead:
“Draft slides, 10–11am”
Time-boxing gives structure and creates a natural sense of pressure. It also stops tasks from swallowing your entire afternoon.
Step 6: Keep your priorities visible
A list is only useful if you see it.
Choose a format that stays in view:
a notebook open on your desk
a digital tool like Todoist, Trello, or Asana
or a sticky note with your top three on your monitor
The visibility matters more than the tool.
Step 7: Communicate priorities to your team
One of the biggest leadership mistakes is keeping priorities in your head. Your team doesn’t just need tasks - they need to understand sequencing and trade-offs.
Instead of:
“We need to hit these three goals.”
Say:
“Goal A is the most critical. If something has to slip, let Goal C be the one.”
This enables aligned decision-making when you're not in the room.
Step 8: Review and reset daily
At the end of each day, spend five minutes answering:
What did I finish?
What’s still important?
What actually needs attention tomorrow?
And if a task keeps moving from day to day, consider whether it deserves to stay on the list at all.
Leadership in practice: Sarah’s story
A client of mine - let’s call her Sarah - was leading a creative agency during a chaotic growth phase. Everyone’s lists were overflowing. The team was exhausted, but progress was slow.
We introduced a weekly “Top 3 priorities” ritual. Each leader shared their personal top three for the week, aligned with the agency’s overall top three.
The results were instant. Instead of 47 half-finished items, the agency had nine completed priorities that actually mattered. Clients noticed. Deadlines stabilised. And Sarah felt more grounded because she knew what to ignore as well as what to do.
When prioritisation feels impossible
Sometimes everything genuinely feels important. When that happens:
Set criteria: revenue, client impact, risk, team wellbeing — choose your filters.
Ask the “future regret” question: which task will you regret not doing in three months?
Sequence: you may not be able to do all five priorities this week, but you can plan when each one will get attention.
Tools to support better prioritisation
A few extras leaders find useful:
MOCHA framework: Manager, Owner, Consulted, Helper, Approver — great for delegation clarity.
Weekly reset: choose your top three for the week before Monday hits.
Kill a task: intentionally delete something weekly. Subtraction is often the best prioritisation tool.
When lists don’t work for you
Not everyone likes lists. That’s fine.
Try a Kanban board - To Do, Doing, Done - and move tasks visually. Or Trello, Asana or another platform that works for you.
Or use your calendar as your list. If it’s not scheduled, it probably won’t happen.
The method doesn’t matter. The clarity does.
Reflective questions for leaders
To help you strengthen your prioritisation habits, ask yourself:
Is my list a helpful guide or a source of guilt?
Do I know my top three priorities - and does my team know them too?
Am I spending most of my time on urgent tasks or important ones?
What could I delete entirely?
If I only got one thing done tomorrow, what would I want it to be?
Final thoughts
Leadership shouldn’t feel like survival mode. It should feel clear, confident, and human. Prioritisation isn’t about squeezing more in - it’s about focusing on the work that actually moves you, your team, and your business forward.
If this resonates and you’d like support shaping or strengthening your vision, you’ll find details of my programmes, workshops, and coaching at waterfallhill.co.uk.
