In prioritizing tasks, appreciate that not all tasks are made equal. Articulate the parameters you understand (eg. project size, complexity), but also discuss those that you don’t (eg. strategy, skill needed, etc) so your team can converge on a shared view that separates what is truly important from that which is simply urgent.
The framework I use is typically a table with rows enumerating projects/tasks and columns with confidence levels for execution, strategy, org alignment and market conditions. A high-leverage task is one where you have high confidence on most columns. A low-impact task is one where you have low to medium confidence on two or more dimensions. When something stands out as low-impact but shouldn’t be, you’re able to escalate and have the right conversations to change dimensions that were off-balance. Parameterizing your tasks and writing down your assumptions about them help everyone get on the same page faster, and ensure you aren’t accidentally prioritizing overhead.
