Prioritising and to do lists

Prioritising and to-do lists. This is what we'll be talking about on today's episode of How to Lead the Podcast for CEOs, founders and leaders who want some clear tools, techniques, and strategies to help them lead well so their teams thrive and results follow. My name is Kate Waterfall Hill. I'm a leadership coach with hands-on experience in board level roles for numerous businesses, agencies, and consultancies for over 30 years now.

If you like my take on leadership but would like more support to actually put my ideas into practice, have a look at my website, waterfall hill.co.uk.

Many of my clients say they come to me for the content and the levity. We have a bit of a laugh, but they stay for the accountability.

The guidance, and if they're on the leadership accelerator program, the group of people going through similar challenges alongside them. So if that sounds like you head to my website and see how we might work together.

Today we're talking about something deceptively simple to do, lists and prioritisation. You probably know that a to-do list without prioritisation is just a catalogue of guilt, and as a leader, your job isn't to get everything done, it's to get the right things done. so why is it that to-do list can feel a little bit hopeless sometimes? Nearly all the leaders I coach have a version of the same complaint.

My list just keeps getting longer. I tick off the small things, but never make a dent in the big projects. I don't even know what's important anymore. The problem isn't usually effort, it's focus without prioritisation. You can end up being busy all day, but not actually feeling like you're moving forwards. As Greg McKeown, the author of the book, Essentialism says, if you don't prioritise your life, someone else will.

Let's see. First what Linda, the bad manager has to say about her to-do lists.

“I dunno what to do with myself. I've got so much to do. Yeah, I've just got lists, endless lists all over the place. I've got paper list here, I've got a notebook there. I've got it on my screen, I've got it on my phone. How do I decide what I'm gonna do first?

The people who shout the loudest, they get their stuff done first. Yeah. Usually it's the urgent things that I prioritize. Not necessarily the most important. No. How do I know what I'm supposed to be doing? 'cause I've got so many lists everywhere.

Well, I don't really, I just do things as they come up on my screen or as they come to mind, and I just get those things done, tick that off, think, yes, I've done something. And then there's something else comes in before I know where I'm, I've got a team's message, I've got an email come in.

Do I have any system for working out what I've gotta do on a daily basis or on a weekly basis or a monthly basis? And work out how to prioritize those. Um, when you say prioritize, you mean the urgent things? The person who shouts the loudest? No, you mean the most important right. No, I haven't got a system for doing that.

You think I should block out some time just to look at exactly what I'm supposed to be doing, make sure I'm prioritizing the important things. Okay. When am I supposed to do that?”

Once again, Linda hasn't quite got the hang of it, but prioritisation is a key leadership skill, so I've only really dig into this. It's about making choices, often uncomfortable ones because you can't do everything and neither can your team. here are some of the biggest traps that I see leaders fall into.

First of all, everything feels urgent because you're reacting to emails, meetings, or team requests is easy to think. Everything is top priority. then, there's often confusion between what's urgent and actually what's important.

Answering a slack message feels productive, but does it really move your business forward?

And then the third one is delegating without prioritising, because handing tasks to your team, but without clarity on what matters most, is how people end up spinning plates instead of really focusing on what matters.

Now if your to-do list is looking a bit more like a guilt journal than anything else, because it's so long unruly and full of half-finished items that never quite move, then looking at them can feel like a reminder of what you haven't done rather than a tool to help you make progress.

But used well, a to-do list or a version of it is a decision-making tool.

It is not just a record of everything in your head, it's a way to clarify what matters most right now and research backs this up. A study from Wake Forest University found that simply writing tasks down reduces those intrusive thoughts that can take over our thinking.

In other words, literally getting things out of your head and onto paper makes you calmer and more focused. but there are lists. And there are lists. And the problem with most of them are these three things. One is they're an endless scroll, a giant list of 73 items all mixed together with no sense of priority.

Then you get the dopamine chasers, people who tick off the easy tasks, replying to one email, ordering the printer ink, but avoiding the big meaningful ones. And then there's the disappearing act. People who write lists and then never look at them again, or constantly rewrite them without moving things forward.

Any of those sound familiar?

So let's take a step by step approach. First of all, let's have a brain dump and then sort it. So get everything out of your head. Write everything down from finalized budget forecast to buy some more dog food.

And then we need to sort it where the prioritization framework comes in. So you might want to use something like the Eisenhower Matrix. You've probably seen this one before. Urgent versus important. Now, the urgent and important stuff, you just got to get on and do it. Make that the biggest priority, the important, but not urgent stuff.

Plan it. Book some time in your calendar when you know you're going to have the chance to get on with it. And then urgent, but not important. I suggest you delegate it if you can. And then if it's neither urgent nor important, then why are you doing it at all?

Here's the leadership twist. The most valuable quadrant is important, not urgent. That's where the strategic work lives, the vision, the relationship building, coaching your team. If you never carve out time here, you'll always feel like you're firefighting.

Another way to prioritise is the impact versus effort grid for each task asked. What's the impact if I get this done? And how much effort will it take? And then when it's high impact, but low effort, gold, do it soon. If it's high impact, high effort, plan it properly.

If it's low impact, low effort, those are the quick wins. You might want to do those in between meetings. If it's low impact and high effort. Question why it's even on your list at all.

So if you use this to restructure your week, instead of starting with emails, low impact, low effort, you might begin with client strategy calls and investor updates, high impact, moderate effort, The shift will be apparent straight away.

Another way of prioritising I really like is the 1-3-5 rule. Each day aim for one big thing, something strategic or chunky that you really can get your teeth into. Also have three medium things, so those important meetings, coaching your team maybe and doing follow-ups, and then five small things, spending 10 minutes doing your emails, a bit of admin, some quick calls.

This forces you to scale your day realistically instead of piling on 20 things that you'll never complete. And then you get that sense of frustration that you're not progressing like you want to.

Another way of deciding whether you need to get on with something is the hell yes test.

Derek Siver said if it was not a hell yes. Then it's a no. This works well for leaders drowning in opportunities and requests. If a task meeting or project doesn't clearly move the dial, then why is it still on your list?

So before I come to step three, I'm just going to recap. Step one is the brain dump and then step two is using some sort of prioritisation framework. Now step three is limit the daily list. research suggests our brains can only focus on around three to five significant tasks a day

Anymore, and you set yourself up for frustration. So keep a master list with everything, but each day create a today list with just three priorities.

If you finish these three priorities, then brilliant. But if you started the day with 12 priorities and end up not doing them all, then you feel like you failed. Step four then is sequence. Don't just select. Prioritisation isn't choosing what matters. It's choosing when it matters too.

So people talk about eat the frog, do the hardest and most important thing first before the day runs away with you. maybe have a look at your energy levels. So do some energy mapping. notice when you're focused is sharpest. For many, it's the morning. For me, actually it's the evening.

But put your highest value work there. Then plan your recovery. Because prioritisation isn't just tasks, it's also rest, reflection, and boundaries. People who don't prioritise these things then end up burning out. Now step five, time box. Don't just list. So work on a presentation is vague. Instead, time box it, draft.

The first 10 slides between 10 and 11:00 AM be really clear. Our brains take tasks more seriously when they have a start and a finish time, and it helps stop meetings and emails expanding endlessly. Then step six, keep it visible. A list is only useful if you actually look at it. And that might mean a notebook open on your desk, a digital app, like to-do list Trello or Asana, or even a sticky note with your three priorities stuck to your monitor.

My favourite is using my remarkable. The key is don't let it get buried. Make sure you can put your hand on it whenever you need it. And then step seven, communicate your priorities to your team.

One of the biggest mistakes I see leaders make is keeping all their priorities in their own head. your team doesn't just need tasks assigning to them. They need to know what comes first when trade-offs appear.

So for example, instead of saying, we need to hit these three goals, say, goal A is most critical. If something has to slip, let it be goal C. That way when you're not in the room, people can still make aligned decisions. And then step eight is review and reset. At the end of the day, review, what did I finish, what's still left and what's actually important for tomorrow?

And here's a challenge. If a task keeps moving from day to day, ask yourself, does it really deserve to be on the list at all?

Do you need to have a different approach to it? And is it something you need to put as a priority so you actually make progress?

I often work with agencies, creative ones in particular, and they often are going through chaotic growth phases. Everyone's lists are overflowing, people are always busy, but somehow the business doesn't seem to be moving forwards, so I often suggest that they introduce a weekly top three priorities meeting.

Each leader comes with their personal top three for the week, aligned with the agency's overall top three. And then suddenly, instead of 47, half-finished things, the business has nine completed items that actually matter. Clients will notice deadlines stabilise, and you as a leader and your teams feel calmer because you know what to ignore as well as what to do.

Sometimes you'll face too many competing priorities, and so here's what I suggest. Three different steps. First of all, set criteria. Decide what matters most. Is it revenue, client impact staff wellbeing, risk reduction. Use those as filters. Then secondly, ask the future regret question. Which of these will I regret not doing three months from now?

And then number three, sequence. Maybe you can't do all five things this week, but you can do one now, one next week, and one the week after.

Be more realistic with your planning and what you can achieve. Here are a couple of things that can keep you focused. A weekly reset on a Friday or first thing on a Monday, choose your top three for the week ahead before the chaos begins. What do you really want to achieve this coming week? Just three. And then kill a task each week. Ask what can I delete? Sometimes the best prioritisation is actually subtraction.

Now, I know not everybody likes a list and I get that. So if that's you, you could try something like a Kanban board. Visual columns of to do doing, done and moving tasks across is quite motivating. Or you could use your calendar as your list. If it's not scheduled, it doesn't exist.

My team and I use Trello, but I know there are lots of other formats for doing this sort of thing. So make sure you find a format that's good for you because the format matters less than the principle. The idea is that you need to have clarity, focus, and follow through.

As always, I've got some reflective questions for you to consider. First of all. What's my current relationship with my to-do list? Is it a helpful guide or a source of guilt? Do I know my top three priorities this week? And does my team know them too? Am I spending most of my time on urgent tasks or important ones?

And what's one thing that I should just delete from my to-do list altogether? And this final one's a really good one for focusing. If I only got one thing done tomorrow, what would I want it to be? Make really clear your intentions and you're more likely to get it done.

That's all for today's episode of How to Lead. Until next time, if you want to be less like Linda, keep leading with clarity, care, and curiosity. If you've enjoyed this episode, do follow for more insights and please do spare a moment to like leave a review and share with your Fellow leaders to help spread the word about the How to Lead Podcast.

If you'd like some help to implement some of the ideas that I talk about on this podcast, do get in touch because I have lots of coaching programs that could be just right for you. Don't forget, the best leaders are clear on the vision, care about their people, and approach interactions with curiosity, not judgment.

Until next time, thanks for listening and don't be a Linda.