Chapter 3 — Prioritise

The chapter opens with the user-growth problem: a growth team has dozens of plausible levers — signup-form conversion, paid traffic, app speed, viral content, search referrals, simpler onboarding, engagement emails, referrals, content ranking, mobile, internationalisation — and has to pick. The right focus compounds (even a 0.5% weekly win adds up like interest); the wrong one costs months or years of opportunity.

But prioritising isn’t a growth-team thing. There are always more tasks than time, so working on one means not working on another. That makes prioritisation itself a high-leverage activity — it sets the leverage of everything else. Spending weeks on something with little impact and few lessons is barely different from not working at all.

Track to-dos in a single, accessible list

A good checklist improves outcomes even for experts. Holding things in your head is costly: research shows that spending effort remembering tasks drains attention, hurts decision-making, even impairs physical performance. Treat your brain as a processor, not a memory bank.

The workflow: keep a short set of important goals, pick initial tasks toward them, then repeatedly make a pairwise comparison between what you’re doing now and what else is on the list.

Ask on a recurring basis: is there something else I could be doing that’s higher-leverage? If not, carry on. If yes, rethink.

The aim isn’t a perfect total ordering of priorities — any ordering rests on imperfect information — it’s to keep shifting your top priorities toward the highest-leverage ones given what you currently know.

Focus on what directly produces value

A recurring lesson: time and effort spent don’t necessarily correlate with value produced.

“Activity is not necessarily production… Many work activities do not directly contribute towards useful output.” — Yishan Wong

So the first heuristic is to focus on what directly produces value, measured in products shipped, users acquired, business metrics moved or sales made — not hours worked, tasks completed, lines written or meetings attended. Write the necessary feature, clear the roadblock or approval holding back a launch, make sure teammates are on the right tasks, handle high-priority support issues. And keep effort proportional to expected impact.

Focus on the important and non-urgent

We let life’s daily interruptions, rather than our priorities, dictate our schedules.

Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) warns against confusing urgency with importance, and advocates “putting first things first.” His four-quadrant model:

Letting the urgent crowd everything out — Quadrant 1 (high-priority support, deadlines) and Quadrant 3 (most email, calls, meetings) — means neglecting Quadrant 2: important but not urgent.

Quadrant 2 includes career planning, building relationships, professional reading, new productivity habits, building workflow tools, investing in useful abstractions, scaling infrastructure, learning new languages, speaking at conferences, and mentoring teammates. None have natural deadlines, so urgency never forces them — yet they deliver the most long-term value.

Find your Quadrant 2 to-dos and protect them; deprioritise unimportant Quadrant 3/4 work. And be wary of too much Quadrant 1 firefighting (pages, urgent bugs, deadlines): check whether you’re treating symptoms rather than the root cause — which is often an under-investment in a Quadrant 2 activity.

Protect your maker’s schedule

Engineers need longer, contiguous blocks than many professionals. Productivity rises in periods of flow — Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s “state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems.”

Managers think in one-hour blocks, but as Paul Graham’s maker’s-schedule idea has it, makers “generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.”

Ways to protect it:

• Stack meetings back-to-back, or at the start/end of the day, instead of scattering them.
• Block off hours on your calendar (a fake meeting works), or run something like “No Meeting Wednesdays.”
• Say no to meetings that don’t need you and low-priority commitments that fragment the day.

Limit work in progress

Once you’ve prioritised and carved out focus time, it’s tempting to juggle many things. But fragmenting attention reduces overall productivity and blocks substantive progress on anything. Constant context-switching kills deep engagement.

The same applies to teams: when a small group spreads across too many tasks, they stop sharing context for design discussions and reviews, priorities compete, and momentum stalls.

Fight procrastination with if-then plans

Sometimes the blocker isn’t time or switching — it’s lacking the motivation to summon the activation energy to start something hard. Heidi Grant Halvorson (Succeed) describes the if-then plan: decide in advance the situation that triggers a task. “If it’s after my 3pm meeting, then I’ll investigate that long-standing bug.” “If it’s right after dinner, then I’ll watch a lecture on Android development.”

If-then plans also fill the small gaps in a maker’s schedule. Keep a list of short tasks that don’t need a big contiguous block:

• Code review
• Interview feedback
• Email
• Investigating a small bug
• Writing an isolated unit test

Make a routine of prioritisation

As time passes, your current project may stop being the best use of your time. A month-long infra change balloons to three months once you hit hidden complexity — still worth finishing? An old feature starts paging you an hour a day mid-build — pause and fix it properly? You find yourself wrestling a legacy codebase — refactor first?

Answers vary case by case. The key is being retrospective and making a habit of revisiting priorities — ideally building a morning prioritisation pass into your daily routine.

Key takeaways

• Write down and review to-dos. Spend mental energy prioritising, not remembering.
• Work on what directly leads to value. Regularly ask if there’s something higher-leverage.
• Work on the important and non-urgent. Prioritise long-term investments even without deadlines.
• Reduce context switches. Protect large focus blocks; limit concurrent projects.
• Use if-then plans against procrastination. Binding an intention to a trigger makes it far more likely to happen.
• Make prioritisation a habit. Do it regularly and focusing on high-leverage work gets easier.

Source

Edmond Lau, The Effective Engineer, Ch. 3.