Someone once taught me a really simple way to prioritize your to-do list. It’s broadly applied to a lot of things.
Basically, you draw a Punnett Square, but instead of genetic traits, you use importance and urgency. So your top left will be “important, urgent”; your top right will be “important, not urgent”; your bottom left will be “not important, urgent”; and your bottom right will be “not important, not urgent”.
This, I’ve found, is a great way to make sure that everything you label “important, urgent” gets done (or at least looked at), and everything else gets ignored until it’s all-of-a-sudden important or urgent.
Combined with my tendency towards “projects“, this method is how I make it look like my office is filled with Tibetan prayer flags made from Post-Its, each of them noting something that I have deemed either “not important” or “not urgent”.
Posted by alexthegraham 
