Life is throwing everything at you and you don’t even know where to begin. Here’s why and how to prioritize when everything feels important.

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Life is running at such a breakneck pace.

We’re constantly drinking from a firehouse of information and drowning in all the adulting, career and family responsibilities.

As a stay at home dad, I had to learn on the fly.

While keeping two tiny humanoids alive and well-fed, I also had a small business to run with clients to check on regularly.

My living room was my office, the playpen, my home gym and my studio for creating video content.

I remember the days when I thought I was Super Dad and could handle all of the world’s problems in a single day while raising humans. It led to total burnout.

That’s when I realized I needed to find a better way.

In order to survive without losing my shit, I had to properly prioritize.

It meant a focus on doing fewer things every day, but doing them well.

But how do you know which things to actually focus on versus the seemingly unimportant tasks that could be eliminated?

Not everything can be crucial and important.

Even though it all feels like it right now.

Learning how to juggle these things, learning how to manage the competing priorities is a high level skill.

Today you’re going to learn that skill.

In this newsletter, you’re going to learn how to prioritize when everything feels important and urgent.

You’ll come away with a system that will help you focus a bit better, get more things done, do it with higher quality and feel accomplished at the end of your days without the burnout and overwhelm. Sound good?

Let’s get into it.

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Prioritizing starts with making a choice

We spend most of our lives being reactive.

Saying “yes” to most things that come across your desk.

Starting your days by catching up on the latest tea from coworkers before diving into your tasks.

You make these massive To Do Lists by just word-vomiting everything down onto a piece of paper (or into some fancy app).

But, you can’t figure out where to start with that laundry list of action items. You get overwhelmed just looking at the thing and freeze up.

What’s a priority? Especially when everything feels urgent?

Competing priorities are like two people talking loudly at the same time. Their voices clash. It’s hard to decipher one message from the other.

This is what it’s like when you’ve got multiple objectives screaming in your face and bogging down your To Do List.

Deadlines are staring you down.

Teams from other departments are begging for attention.

Clients are demanding updates.

Kids need you to fill out that damn form from their teacher.

Oh … and what’s for dinner? When are you going to workout?

And it’s only fucking Tuesday.

Now you’re inundated with a mountain of suck, so you check out.

Overwhelm has kicked in.

You don’t even know where to begin. So you don’t.

The answer is going to sound funny, but it’s honestly to do fewer things and make a smaller To Do List.

That’s going to allow you to focus.

At its most basic function, prioritizing is just choosing where you’re going to direct your focus in the current moment.

Prioritize the boulders of your day first

You’ve probably seen the metaphor with the rocks and the empty bucket popularized by author Stephen Covey from his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

It’s a visual metaphor that will help you prioritize when everything feels important.

There’s an empty bucket and your job is to fill it with big rocks, some pebbles and sand, but if you don’t go in the proper order, you’ll never fit everything in the bucket.

If you pour in the sand first, you’ll never clear enough room for the bigger rocks.

This bucket is your life.

Too many little (seemingly urgent) tasks are blocking you from getting your bigger things done.

The order of operations is to focus on the boulders first.

You first fill up the bucket with the big rocks (these are your priorities for the day), then you add the pebbles, followed by the sand.

View your time and priorities in the same way.

But … How do you determine your big rocks, though?

It’s time to ask yourself some questions about urgency versus importance.

I had a middle manager NPC that would send almost every single email with “high importance” flagged. So damn annoying. I’m sure you’ve had a coworker who does the same.

It ended up being like the Boy Who Cried Wolf: eventually I stopped treating every email like it was a five-alarm fire.

Because every little thing cannot be urgent.

Just because someone else is feeling some kinda way about that urgency doesn’t always mean you have to stop everything you’re doing to bail them out.

Be okay saying no.

You cannot be everything for everyone.

Read that again.

Are you feeling urgency because this is truly a fire that needs putting out?

Or are you feeling urgency because of a narrative you’ve built up in your head?

Sure, the urgent stuff feels really big right now. That’s because of recency bias: It’s new and fresh because someone else sent it with the “high importance” flag, so you get sucked into that energy.

Set the intention now that you are not going to fall trap to corporate urgency.

One thing I learned from my time in corporate: We weren’t solving cancer.

Even when I worked for one of the largest veteran service non-profits in the country, it was important to put things in perspective … that email could usually wait.

That NPC boss was just being terrible at her job.

Clarity leads to better prioritization

What is your goal?

Life goals. Project goals. Daily goals. What are they?

You simply cannot know what your priorities (or big rocks) are if you don’t even know what your overall objective is.

When was the last time you sat down and found clarity on the vision for your life?

If your mind is drowning in overwhelm and lacks direction on where you’d like to be one year, five years, even 10 years from now … then your first priority is to find that direction and clarity.

What are your values?

What would you like your lifestyle to be like in the foreseeable future?

You should have a grand vision for how you’d like to live your life.

But then on the micro level: What do you need to get done today to make sure you are getting closer to your life, project and/or daily objective(s)?

When you have a vision and you’ve mapped out your own values, it makes it far easier to choose your priorities and live them each day.

Identify your boulders, big rocks and pebbles

Now you have a goal.

List out the projects and tasks that are the most important towards getting to that goal.

These are your boulders. They are the priorities.

Maybe you’ve got a big project you’re working on. Or a presentation. Maybe the boulder for today is just making sure you exercise. Whatever it is, this is your primary focus.

Secondary importance are your big rocks. These might be the “urgent” things that assault your inbox and fill out your To Do List.

Then you’ve got the pebbles.

I also like to call these mosquito tasks.

These are the things that bug the shit out of us throughout our day, like replying to school emails, scheduling doctor appointments, calling Amazon because they fucked up your order.

I like to schedule one or two hours in my week to block out time for those mosquito tasks and make a game out of how many I can swat away.

And finally you have the sand.

These are the littlest of tasks that are unlikely to move the needle on anything, but you’ve gotta do them anyway (like hydrating and daily mobility).

Try the 4 Quadrants approach

If you’re still a bit stuck, you can use the 4 Quadrants approach from Covey to simplify this prioritization process:

Take a paper and divide it up into four quarters or “quadrants.”

Quadrant No. 1: Urgent and Important (your boulders)

This is like that major project that has an upcoming deadline. It’s gotta be done. And it’s gotta be done with high quality or else you and the team fail. Focus on this first.

Quadrant No. 2: Not Urgent, but Important (big rocks)

A longer-term project that still requires attention, but the deadline is down the road. Your boss emailed you about setting up a pitch meeting and getting available dates handy. It’s something you definitely need to do, but not right now at this very moment.

Quadrant 3: Urgent, but Not Important (pebbles)

You get an email with a limited time offer attached to it. Sure you’ve gotta “act fast,” but it’s not going to determine whether you win the day or help the team secure that next pitch.

Quadrant 4: Neither Urgent nor Important (sand)

These are the things that you could likely cut from your day and wouldn’t notice the difference, like doomscrolling (here’s how to fix that for good), stopping by Susie’s desk to gossip, responding to trolls on social media.

I found this handy visual from Purdue University that you can print out for yourself to develop your own 4 Quadrant matrix.

Focus on one thing at a time

None of this makes any sense if you’re going to develop poor habits.

Once you’ve determined your priorities for the day, you’ve got to block out the distractions and focus on that priority.

Multitasking is proven to be incredibly inefficient and ineffective. More on that in a recent newsletter here.

Your brain wants to specialize and focus on one specific thing at a time and can take upwards of 10-15 minutes to settle into clear focus as you switch to a new assignment.

This is called context switching.

Instead of being efficient, focused and productive on one thing, you’re half-assing multiple things and sacrificing quality for the illusion of productivity.

Starting today, you’re going to do one thing at a time.

It will start with your boulders … then eventually trickle down to the big rocks, and then the pebbles.

“I’m going to focus on this one thing right now.”

One rock at a time.

Prioritizing when everything feels important starts here

Full transparency: a few days ago, I was really feeling the nervous energy of overwhelm and burnout starting to creep up on me again.

It’s an ongoing battle and I’m finally realizing that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Instead of trying to “push through” and “suck it up” or just rely on discipline and willpower to force my way through it, I did exactly what I wrote about today. (Here’s a better way to view discipline)

I slowed down and got clear on my goals and values.

Then I re-evaluated what is currently serving and what things are not in alignment with my vision.

Sometimes, you need that friendly reset.

“When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.”

–– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

If you feel like you’re drinking from a water hose and drowning in an endless stream of tasks, return to yourself and your values.

It’s okay to reset back to the default setting for a minute, slow things down, get a better perspective and then take more action.

That’s how you win the long game.

I hope you found this useful. If so, I’d appreciate it if you sent this newsletter to one person you think would benefit from my writing today.

And if you’re new here and enjoyed this newsletter, I’d be honored if you subscribed for more at this link.

And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “prioritize when everything feels important” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Until next time,
Pete