Prioritization as a Superpower

They are right, but I think the message may be coming from the wrong person here. To be fair I don't know this person's history nor care to look at the moment. A VC prioritizes writing checks and supporting their picks as some sort of coaching role.

If this article came from a founder on their experiences with prioritization, I think it would feel more genuine and insightful of what you might be able to take away from it.

I work as a big tech PM and prioritization is my job. I've explored hundreds of ways to do it. Found some good ones, found some bad ones. What I can say is that experience is the only way you become accustomed to the characteristics the author is mentioning with regards to people who are good at prioritization.

The most effective tool I've found? The 80/20 rule or known as Pareto's Principle. That has applied to every single project, program, and initiative I've been apart of to large degrees of success. It's the most flexible and can apply everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Another interesting one depending where you work is the 1% rule. This helps you demonstrate whether certain things benefit everyone, or just a small but loud few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

If you start every day with 'what's our priority for today' - that indicates a lack of planning, a word not mentioned in this article. Running around like a chicken sans head is another way to describe this kind of leadership. Now if you have a 'priority meeting' once a week (at most, once a month might really be better) in which tasks are decided on and workloads are passed out, then people will be able to concentrate on those tasks. Maybe have a once-a-week sit-down meeting with individuals to monitor progress, offer encouragement, solve problems that might be holding things up, etc.

I sometimes wonder if smartphone culture is at least partially to blame for a tendency towards an inability to plan things in advance. Smartphones make it easy for people to constantly change their schedules, make last-minute arrangements, and they also promote the immediate gratification mentality.

A colleague of mine brings the cryptic crossword to work and everyone tries to get at least one. The point is that right next to it is the horoscopes - and they are so obviously just full of nice platitudes that could apply to anyone.

The list of traits needed for a founder are very similar. Flexible - yeah sure that's me. Imaginative? Humble ? tick tick.

What makes a real founder? Dunno. But i doubt it's a priori qualities of that person. I would like to see a BC fund randomly assign money to citizens. See what realmempircal evidence tells us.

I agree.

With that out of the way, there's a huge "but".

My personal experience after having worked in a number of different fields, is that many people who consider themselves to be super-prioritizers are basically borderline a***s who "delegate", "know when to say no", and "follow the pareto principle".

When any one of these is used sparingly and in isolation, it can help and make a positive difference. But when all 3 are present at the same time, it's a huge red flag.

It leads to people who readily dump work on others, while systematically refusing to take off other people's load when possible, and half-ass their job, effectively achieving "efficiency" by not doing stuff, secure in the knowledge that someone else will sacrifice their own efficiency to pick up the slack. And all this while feeling good about themselves on how efficient they're being.

And unfortunately, because of silly metrics that tend to favour such people, this creates a vicious cycle, with dysfunctional teams, and inefficiencies becoming externalised all over the place.

Last year I launched a perfect tool exactly for prioritization / item selection from any list.

For example, you can choose your most necessary goals using SMART++ criteria (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-phased, Ethical, Environmentally sound, Positively stated, etc.). Or you can prioritize weekly tasks, evaluating them by your criteria of choice (Urgency, Importance, Unavoidability, Manageability, Impact, Ethical, social, and ecological responsibility, Financial return, etc.)

Or the author of the article, as an investor, could get help choosing a founding team for funding, evaluating them by the criteria he mentioned: hungry, humble, knowledgeable, and attractive for talent.

Here is the link: https://www.1st-things-1st.com

For more substantial and actionable guidance, I recommend the book "Algorithms to Live By".

Priority used to not be plural, and it meant "the first thing".

If you can get it down to the one thing you need to be doing right now, you'll be good. If you choose the wrong priority, then that's feedback for future priority selection.

Do not choose more than one thing. Just choose more frequently the smaller the tasks you need to complete are. Entry level engineering is usually a few things a day, the more senior it becomes one a day to one a week. Once you're in the executive ranks, it becomes one a month/quarter.

The mistake many people make is thinking they need to pick more than one thing because they have so many simultaneous things occurring. This is an incorrect view of time - you can only do one. Pick one. The world's urgency will interrupt you sufficiently that the rest is largely just task urgency update management.

If you struggle to pick something, I've found alltom's tooling great: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/priorities-in-motion/id1577124...

Maybe I’m just a grump but this class of article is painful: you’ve got hand-wavy unsubstantiated claims and nothing tactical a reader can take away to make their life better. You can simplify it to a short tweet: “prioritization is really important for founders”. I’m coming to dislike this kind of content-less content - it’s a waste of time to produce and consume.

Managing teams of software developers, my #1 task was to make sure the team stayed on track, instead of drifting off working on lower priority tasks. Making sure you always work on what is most important is a surprisingly rare skill.

This is a very good point. Prioritization is a hugely underestimated skill. This article just made me realize I do not put enough effort into prioritizing things in my work.

How would I train myself to prioritize better? I tend to do the most fun things of my to-do list, or choose tasks that are urgent in the short term.

This reminds me about the idea of staying focused that Steve Jobs was very fond of. There is an interesting video of Jony Ive sharing the lessons he learned from Steve showing how powerful and subtle the point of prioritization can be.