In the busiest seasons of life, everything feels important. During grad school, I can remember feeling so overwhelmed at times that even doing laundry felt like too much – sometimes, I’d buy cheap new socks from Amazon and throw the dirty ones away! I imagine new moms, working parents, budding entrepreneurs, accountants in April, healthcare workers in a pandemic, and many others know the same pressure. Your socks might be clean, but everything else feels cluttered. So, how do you prioritize when everything feels important?
First, recognize effective time management is not about getting everything done; it’s knowing what’s best to leave unfinished. Everyone has advice about how to squeeze more in, but that’s often impractical and quickly leads to burnout. Instead, it’s more important to discern what’s acceptable to leave undone without lasting repercussions on your career, family, and health. This strategy won’t help you to do more, but it should help you stress less. For everyone else who feels too busy to fold their laundry, I’ve found the best way to prioritize when everything feels important is to bucket your time and then let (most) things go.
“Effective time management is not about getting everything done; it’s knowing what’s best to leave unfinished.”
Bucket Your Time
Imagine grouping your responsibilities into several “buckets” based on your commitments: work, school, family, and social, for example. Your buckets might include volunteering, caretaking, exercise, and other priorities. When you’re really stressed, everything seems essential. But in reality, the lowest priority in one bucket is often more important than the top priority in another.
If you’re a parent, taking your kids to the playground—a low priority in your family bucket, but important overall—might not feel as pressing as finishing a vital work project—a high priority in your work bucket, but less important overall. When calm, you intuitively know the choices you want to make. But during a stressful period, when trying to rank everything together on one massive to-do list, it’s too hard to distinguish between what’s urgent at the moment and what’s important long-term.
The key, then, is to rank your buckets beforehand. That way, when things get busy, you don’t have to choose between everything you need to do. Instead, you’ve already predetermined your priorities. Take the most important bucket on your list, and finish as much as you can in it. Once you do those things, move to the next bucket. You don’t have to empty a bucket entirely to move to another. But with this approach, you’ll still accomplish the lower-priority tasks in your most important bucket first– even if they’re not as urgent as your top priorities in a lesser bucket. By ranking your buckets beforehand, you’ll benefit from a clearer head and better decision-making before things get overwhelming.
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Let (Most) Things Go
The beauty of the buckets is that you’ll always know and accomplish what’s most important to you. But the reality of this approach is that many of the less important tasks – even your top priorities in less important buckets – won’t get done at all. Let me reassure you: it’s okay to leave most things unfinished. Often, it’s preferable to leave many things undone. Even Jesus told his busy friends, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one.” In other words, you’ll always have more to do than you have time to do, but only a few things are significant. If “[wisdom] is knowing what to overlook,” then adulting is knowing what to skip.
So, what is okay to deprioritize? Go back to your buckets. Do everything in your most important bucket first. Skip everything in your least important bucket. Postpone what’s leftover in the middle. This strategy is a streamlined version of the Eisenhower matrix, mapped to your personal priorities. (Hey, if it worked for the 34th President and a five-star general, it’s battle-tested for your business and family too). With the sample buckets I mentioned above, the approach might look something like this:
Family – Do it now
Work – Do it later
School – Do it later
Social – Skip it
What’s different about this strategy from Eisenhower’s is the “delegate” quadrant, which includes the important but non-urgent tasks. While helpful for field generals and Fortune 500 CEOs, delegating’s not always practical for new moms or new founders. Unless your personal assistant is already reading this article for you, finding someone trustworthy and capable to whom you can delegate is often more time-consuming than simply doing it yourself later. Sometimes, the right person to delegate to is you. Not to mention, it’s easy to get stuck trying to decide if something is important enough to delegate at all. If the adage “85% of what we worry about never happens,” the same is true for your time: 85% of what we postpone is ultimately unimportant.
“Sometimes, the right person to delegate to is you.”
Pick Your Priorities
The best way to protect your time is to begin before it gets busy. First, divide your responsibilities into buckets, and pick your priorities when you’re most relaxed and rational. Then, when pressure builds, do as much as you can in your most important bucket first. To clear your schedule and your head, let what lingers in your bottom bucket slide (that’s wise!). And plan what remains in the middle—you’ll get it done, eventually.
Most importantly, don’t try to cram everything onto one overwhelming to-do list. Put first things first, skip what’s secondary, and reschedule the rest. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some emails to leave unread. See you on the playground.
Adapted from Greg’s upcoming book, The Entrepreneur in You →