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đź“Š How do you set priorities?

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One thing I keep struggling with is prioritizing.

There are always too many things that feel important.

And I think solo makers have the same problem as teams - just with all the voices in the head =D

In a team everyone can have a different priority, the designer might want to polish the UI, developers want to fix backend issues, marketing wants to improve the landing page...

So how do you decide what comes first?

Do you have a strategy, use any tools or data, or mostly go with your gut feeling?

What's your approach?

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I usually ask myself, What can I do today that will have the biggest impact on the product?" It helps cut through a lt of noise.

 Agree, that works when you're working alone. But what if you're in a small team and you need to set what's next?
You said you focus on what will have the biggest impact. But what if your teammate thinks another task would have a bigger impact? So prioritization needs some kind of system.

Most of the time, I keep things in my memory, but when I start to feel overwhelmed, I have a very good system...

Prepare for that...


It uses an old-school pen and paper :DDDD

 Haha =D

This method can definitely work. Drawings some diagrams, doodling, or simply writing things down can activate your brain, so the best decisions can come up !

I think the biggest thing is separating “important” from “important right now.”
You figure that out and prioritize around it.

 And what if one co-founder's important right now, doesn’t overlap with important right now of other co-founder?

 That’s where I think you have to zoom out from “what feels urgent to me?” to “what does the business need most right now?”

If co-founders disagree, the shared goal becomes the tie-breaker. And if there’s still disagreement, it’s probably worth testing the assumptions behind each priority rather than debating whose opinion is right.

Sometimes the best priority isn’t either person’s preference, it’s the thing that removes the biggest constraint for everyone.

 Agreed. But how would you transfer that into a system?

Say you're building (designing) a priority dashboard - how would your strategy fit into a prioritization framework?

I am usually the marketing voice in that argument, so my bias is whatever a user would notice this week. We went live today, and the thing I keep relearning is that the item you can explain in one sentence should go first. Anything that needs a paragraph tends to slip anyway.

 But there are things users won’t notice, but they still make the experience better (they won’t even notice that)...
That’s why sometimes we can’t really say what to do next.

Liked your approach of going with the item you can easily explain =)

  Fair, and the invisible ones are usually what stop people leaving rather than what gets them in. The split I use is that anything a new user hits in the first minute has to be explainable, and the invisible work gets its turn in the quiet weeks between launches. How do you protect those quiet weeks?

 Quiet in marketing - fewer calls to use the product and fewer shoutouts.
But it’s not really quiet inside the team =D

  Quiet on the outside only. The weeks where marketing goes silent are usually the ones where the most gets fixed, which nobody outside the team ever sees.

I always have a lot of ideas that I want to try, and prioritizing them has long been a problem for me. Now I have a weird but useful solution: the only priority is the deadline. XD

Here’s why: No matter what you do, if something is approaching its deadline, you have to do it first. I procrastinate, and I think all humans do. This actually led me to discover that I can finish something quickly when the deadline is approaching, because I simply don’t start until time is about to run out—like finishing homework within two days. The amazing thing I found is that I am more focused and my potential is activated in this situation. I’ve tried this before: I played games with my friends in the first few days, then focused during the last two or three days to finish my assignment, and it worked well. The only thing to worry about is whether you can handle the anxiety while you’re playing instead of working.

That’s also an example of how interesting things always occupy your mind. You may have other work to do, but some specific task is the one you want to do most. Instead of doing the others first, you’d better do this one first, or you will keep thinking about it and may never actually start.

In short, just consider urgency and interest. If a task is urgent, do it. If it's not urgent but more interesting, do it. If it's neither urgent nor interesting, do something else.

 Thanks for your detailed answer!

I agree with you about tasks that occupy your mind =)

But for urgency and deadlines, I still have the same question: how do you prioritize which task should get a deadline in the first place? How do you decide what’s really urgent?

Sometimes all the tasks are so closely related that it’s difficult to figure out which one should come first.

 Maybe if you can't figure out what's more urgent, just randomly pick one and do it. If you feel it's not the right one, switch to another？
I think in this case, since you need to finish both, there's no need to identify which one is more urgent. Actually, even if you set deadlines for all the tasks, not all of them will be finished on time. Planning sometimes can cost more time than actually doing the work. Hope I understood your question correctly ：）

 Got it.

But look, for example, if you're a production manager, you have the full picture of the project. So you have to create tasks, set priorities, and distribute them among your teammates.

There must be a logic or strategy behind prioritizing =)

 But when it comes to building a product, doesn't it become easier to manage? For example, focus on the core features first—that's what sets the product apart. Then polish the UI for the MVP, and only add extras if they're useful but not essential.

If it's a complex project—from my experience, like developing a game with a team—I think team productivity is the most important factor. For example, A is an artist who draws quickly and well. B is a UI designer who also does good work but needs more time, so we should ask her to start early, well before we need it. 🤔

The Rule of 3

There's hundreds of things on my todo list. Focus is what matters. Steve Jobs popularized this and ever since I started using it, I don't feel overwhelmed, because I know more is done by focusing on the right things, than splitting focus between 100 different things and not completing any of them.

For myself, I use the rule daily. Get to work, understand priorities within first 15 minutes, write 3 things down. Execute. Whatever can be executed afterwards is just a bonus. Things will start backfiring and you will learn to write the 3 things in a way that makes you deliver value without the need to revisit everything later again. Best feeling ever. Just don't stop. You can deliver 600-700 priorities in a year. That number is what gives me hope that by focusing, I can deliver so much more.

For my team / company, I do the same on weekly basis. Monday morning, set 3 things we must deliver this week. I observe and navigate.

If you already have a product and customers, or want to do this with your life, you can do a yearly 3 priorities as well. For our startup endeavours, I couldn't come up with a 3 month priorities that wouldn't change along the way yet, lol.

Good luck!

 Wow, thanks for this wonderful comment!

This method will definitely give good results. But setting those 3 things is also prioritizing - global prioritizing. And that’s the hardest part! =)

 It sure is, and the challenge is in your own message "There are always too many things that feel important.". While there will always be some gut-feeling priorities, it shouldn't be majority. If it is, you don't have enough pressure on yourself (whether its a deadline, a promise, hanging money or influence waiting on your action).

So at least 1 of those 3 priorities must be getting your skin in the game. Call 10 customers, ask for money. Suddenly you have 30 different things to do and you can easily prioritize them because you know what they told you will and won't sell the product to them. Now execute. But do not execute without skin in the game, because you will likely execute projects nobody cares about.

 Great! Got your point of view, and I really loved it!

At the moment, we're building a task prioritization desk inside our product, so understanding how people actually prioritize helps us understand the process better.

The thing that ended the argument for us was not a better ranking, it was one named owner per decision. Three people can each be right about impact and still deadlock, because impact is an opinion until something ships. Whoever owns the outcome picks, and the rest of us get to be wrong in writing and revisit it in two weeks.

 Nice approach! I especially liked the part about writing it down and revisiting it later to see the actual results.

We started thinking about it like a country: the minister of culture thinks culture should get more funding, the minister of defense thinks the army should, the minister of health... and so on.

There must be a mechanism for allocating limited funds based on priorities.

I think it’s the same inside products.

Most of my prioritizing problem turned out to be a visibility problem. I had a real backlog, it just lived in three places I never opened: saved posts, a screenshots folder, and one notes file. Nothing in there was ranked because nothing in there was ever seen again.

What fixed it was putting the list somewhere I already pass by, then holding every item to one question: is this a decision, or is this just something I collected? Collected stuff is not a priority. It is noise wearing a priority costume.

Once that filter is in place the ranking part gets easy, and pretty boring, which is usually how I know it is working.

 I liked your phrase, noise wearing a priority costume =)

But you know, even when there are only real tasks that need to be done, there’s still the question of which one should come first.