Prioritizing tasks: methods that don’t solve much

In a world where everything is urgent and information overload is the norm, there is a lot of talk about prioritization, and it is even considered an essential skill for survival in today’s workplace.

But perhaps we talk about it too much and it has become a meaningless buzzword that hides the real problem? Because behind the exhortation to manage our priorities well, we mix time management, other people’s emergencies, information overload, which is a collective evil, and many other things.

In fact, prioritizing tasks or managing time is attempting to solve a collective problem at an individual level, knowing that in many cases the choices we consider satisfactory for ourselves will have a negative impact on others.

In a way, prioritizing often comes down to deciding what matters to us, sometimes at the expense of what matters to others. It’s not a political act in business, but it’s close.

In short:

• Prioritization is often presented as an essential individual skill, but it masks collective problems related to information overload, conflicting demands, and a lack of organizational clarity.
• Prioritizing involves weighing what matters to oneself, to others, or to the group, which can create tension in an environment where urgency is ever-present.
• Prioritization methods (Eisenhower, MoSCoW, ICE/RICE, reverse time boxing, The One Thing) provide useful tools but all have limitations, especially when they rely on uncertain data or ignore the collective context.
• Looking for a “good method” is illusory if the organization remains vague about its objectives, prevents people from saying no, and does not address the structural causes of hyperconnectivity and cognitive overload.
• Prioritizing is no longer just about organizing your work efficiently, but about making conscious choices in a flawed system, often without support.

Priority management: a promise that hasn’t quite been fulfilled

Many people confuse prioritization with order of execution. They think that it’s enough to do the fastest or easiest tasks first, but this is a short-sighted approach that doesn’t solve much, because the question we should be asking ourselves is: “What is the next action that has the most value in relation to my goal?”

No tool can answer this question for you. However, certain methods can help you see things more clearly.

Methods that are not without limitations

There are a plethora of priority management techniques, and you have probably already read hundreds of articles on the subject, but we will still review a few of them.

However, we will also discuss what the articles that often present them as “magical” forget: their limitations.

Eisenhower Matrix: two-dimensional intuition

This is the best-known method. It distinguishes between urgency and importance. What you need to do right now is not always what will have an impact tomorrow.

• Urgent & Important: to be done immediately (Do Now)
• Important but not urgent: to be planned (Decide When)
• Urgent but not important: to be delegated (Delegate)
• Neither urgent nor important: to be ignored (Don’t Do)

It has the merit of being simple and visual, which is why it is so successful.

But the notion of urgency has its limits in a world where everything is now urgent. As for knowing what is important or not, this requires asking ourselves whether we are talking about what is important to us, to someone else, or to the collective, and therefore knowing which of the three we are going to prioritize. Note that this also applies to urgency.

Given that we never work alone and that most of the time we contribute to a collective, you can make every effort to fill in your matrix, but the result will inevitably dissatisfy people around you who would have preferred you to prioritize this or that.

Someone I was talking to about this recently told me that in the end, he had decided to evaluate these criteria based on the authority and power of the person he was going to keep waiting. It wasn’t the most effective approach for the business, but it was the safest.

MoSCoW: deciding together what matters

Originating in the agile world, this method is useful when working in a team:

Category	Meaning
Must	What absolutely must be done
Should	What is desirable
Could	What is optional
Won’t	What has been ruled out (for now)

This approach has the advantage of promoting collective decision-making, but it requires consensus on the criteria and a shared vision of collective objectives, otherwise everyone will want to put their own “must-haves” at the top of the list.

ICE / RICE: scoring potential impact

Widely used in product management, this method is based on simple calculations.

ICE: Impact – Confidence – Effort

This method is based on three simple criteria:

• Impact: what benefit will this action produce if it works?
• (on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 = maximum impact)
• Confidence: how sure am I of my impact estimate?
• (expressed as a percentage or on a scale of 0 to 1 – useful against self-delusion)
• Effort: what is the cost or time required to implement it?
• (often in person-days or complexity points)

Formula: ICE = (Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort

This makes it possible to penalize costly and unreliable ideas, even if they appear promising.

RICE: Reach – Impact – Confidence – Effort

RICE is an enhanced version of ICE, which adds an often overlooked factor: the number of people affected.

• Reach: how many people will be affected by this action?
• (e.g., users/month, employees affected, etc.)
• Impact: expected effect on each person.
• (e.g., 3 = significant effect, 2 = moderate, 1 = slight)
• Confidence: level of certainty in the estimates.
• (same as ICE)
• Effort: cost or complexity for the team.
• (same as ICE)

Formula: RICE = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) ÷ Effort

The great advantage of this method is that it allows you to objectively prioritize things. However, it requires reliable data, which is rarely the case in real life. And when you start assigning scores based on guesswork, you end up lacking consistency.

Reverse time boxing: prioritize by energy, not by task

I’ve talked to you about time boxing (If it’s not in your calendar, it doesn’t exist.), and here’s a variation on that theme. Instead of dividing tasks and blocking time in your calendar, you define time slots based on your available energy level and assign a task to one slot or another depending on the energy it requires.

This isn’t really a technique in itself, as it can be used in combination with the other approaches mentioned here, or even with traditional time boxing.

• Morning: strategic or creative tasks (high energy)
• Afternoon: execution or coordination (medium energy)
• End of day: email, routine tasks (low energy)

This method has the advantage of giving you back control over your schedule, but it requires discipline and the ability to say no to interruptions.

The One Thing: for productivity fanatics

Inspired by Gary Keller’s book of the same name, this approach is based on a single question:

“What is the one thing I can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary?”

Every day, one priority. Everything else is secondary.

This approach has the merit of forcing you to make radical choices, but I doubt it can work well in unstable environments…which is the case for just about every business.

The real problem is not the choice of method

Many people look for the “right method” as if it were a magic solution. But as long as the organization remains vague about its objectives, does not give employees the right to refuse, and does not understand that hyperconnectivity (Hyperconnectivity in the workplace: digital becomes a burden) and cognitive overload (Digital Infobesity: When Collaboration Tools Degrade Productivity, QWL and Amplify Mental Workload) are not individual but collective problems, we will continue to painstakingly treat the symptoms without tackling the root cause. The real issue is structural and collective, not individual.

Moreover, the person who is a “bottleneck” at work is rarely responsible for it, but is more a symptom of a deeper problem (Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work) and for these people, prioritization techniques are just one solution among many (How can you avoid becoming a bottleneck in the workplace?).

Prioritization methods are no substitute for a systemic approach to work and team organization. They contribute to it, but they cannot, on their own, compensate for an organization that distributes work without guidelines.

Bottom line

Today, prioritizing is not about optimizing individual efficiency, but about taking a position within a system. It means refusing to suffer, choosing what deserves your attention, and owning it. It’s also almost a daily battle against the organization to compensate for its shortcomings because it is unable to do so itself.

Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)