If you have five things on your to do list today, how do you ensure you get them all done? The answer, which is my best suggestion for living the life you want is: delete four of them. That’s not the punchline to a joke, it’s an effective strategy for getting more of your most important things done and I think of it as ruthless prioritization.
But, I have a confession to make. Lately, I’ve been terrible at prioritizing ruthlessly myself and I needed a reminder that I can always focus better. Running a business solo has a way of doing that to you. There’s no team to delegate to, no manager filtering what lands on your plate, and no one to remind you that you can’t actually do all of it. Everything feels urgent. Every opportunity looks like the one you can’t miss. And before you know it, your to do list is seventeen items long and you’ve somehow moved nothing meaningful forward.
Sound familiar?
Whether you’re a solopreneur, an employee buried under competing requests, or a parent trying to squeeze personal goals into the margins of a full life, ruthless prioritization isn’t optional. It’s survival. And there are some distinct tips I have for getting better at ruthlessly prioritizing.
What “Ruthless” Really Means
The word ruthless gets a bad reputation. It conjures images of cold, uncaring decision-making. But in the context of your time and energy, ruthless just means honest. It means being extremely clear about what matters and having the discipline and courage to act on that clarity.
Greg McKeown captures this beautifully in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. The Essentialist, McKeown argues, doesn’t try to do more in less time. The Essentialist asks: “What is the most important thing I can do right now?” and then pours everything into that. The idea isn’t to get more done. It’s to get the right things done.
“What is the most important thing I can do right now?”
The non-essentialist, by contrast, says yes to everything, feels busy all the time, and wonders why they’re not making real progress. I’ve been that person recently. Maybe you have too.
Why It’s So Hard
Before we get to the how, it’s worth acknowledging why ruthless prioritization is genuinely difficult.
We live in a world that celebrates busyness. It’s a status symbol. Saying “I’m so busy” signals that you’re important, needed, and in demand. Choosing not to do something feels like laziness, or worse, like you’re missing out.
For business owners and freelancers, the fear of missing out is very real and has real financial impacts. Turning down a client, an opportunity, or a new project direction feels like leaving money or momentum on the table. Every start-up I advise has this problem, but it’s the ones that focus that have a better chance of becoming successful.
For everyone, there’s also the cognitive load of endless options. When everything is available to you, deciding what to actually pursue requires a kind of mental energy that’s hard to summon when you’re already stretched thin.
The result? Most of us default to doing everything at a mediocre level rather than fewer things exceptionally well. This is the pattern I’d like to break for myself.
Five Practices for Ruthless Prioritization
Here’s what I’ve found actually works, not just in theory, but in practice, even when it’s hard.
1. Get ruthlessly clear on your one thing.
Not ten. Not five. When I feel really overwhelmed, I ask myself, “What is my one top priority today?”. That question may seem daunting at first, but every time I ask myself which item on my list is going to make me feel really good after I accomplish it today, the answer becomes crystal clear. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky have a similar construct that they describe in their book Make Time called a highlight. It’s the one, most meaningful activity you can accomplish today. You’re really asking, what is the one thing that would move the needle most in your work, your business, and your life today? Write it down at the top of your to do list and focus on it first, until it’s done. Then, you can work on other priorities.
Gary Keller has a similarly effective question in his book, The ONE Thing, “What’s the ONE thing you can do such that doing everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” The answer may result in something far bigger than a task you can accomplish in one day, but once you have your answer, then you can break down that ONE thing into smaller tasks. Everything else on your to do list should be evaluated against whether it supports or distracts from your ONE thing.
McKeown calls this the “essential intent”, one clear decision that guides a thousand future decisions. When you know your essential intent, saying no becomes easier because you have a standard to measure against. A few months ago, I asked myself the same question: “what’s my ONE thing?” and that clarity led me to spin up my own company and quit the start-up I was working at. That work didn’t align with what is most important to me.
2. Schedule the important before the urgent shows up.
Urgent things are loud. They email you, Slack you, call you. Important things are quiet. They’re the creative work, the strategic thinking, the relationship-building that actually builds something lasting. If you wait to find time for the important, you never will.
The practice is simple: block time on your calendar for your top priorities before the week begins. Treat those blocks like meetings you can’t cancel. Let the urgent fill in the margins, not the other way around.
If you can also automate the important, do that. Automating my savings over a period of years led me to the ability to retire early. It’s the same concept: I paid myself first (most of which went into low-cost index funds both inside and outside of retirement vehicles), automatically, before my brain had a chance to tell me it wanted to buy something with that money. Do your important things first.
3. Use “no” as a complete sentence.
One of the most powerful things McKeown suggests is creating a decision-making policy in advance. Instead of evaluating every request fresh (which is exhausting and inconsistent), decide ahead of time what kinds of things you will and won’t take on.
- “I won’t take on new consulting clients in Q1.”
- “I don’t attend meetings without a clear agenda.”
- “Don’t say yes to anything on the day it’s asked.”
He also has a pretty great way of evaluating new opportunities that he shares with another hero of mine, Derek Sivers: “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.”
Policies remove the guilt because you’re not rejecting the person, you’re following your own rules. And that changes everything.
4. Protect your best hours for your most important work.
Not all hours are created equal. Most of us have a window of two to four hours each day when our brains are sharpest, our focus is deepest, and our best work flows most naturally. For many people that’s the morning, but it varies and you almost certainly know when yours is.
The mistake most of us make is spending that window on email, meetings, and other people’s priorities. By the time we finally sit down to do our most important work, we’re running on fumes.
Ruthless prioritization isn’t just about what you work on, it’s about when. Guard your peak hours fiercely. Don’t schedule calls during them or check Slack. Don’t let the inbox dictate your whole day. Use that window exclusively for your one thing, your highlight, your essential intent, whatever you’ve decided matters most. Save the reactive, administrative, and low-stakes work for the hours when your energy naturally dips. I’ve begun to set aside mornings for my most important thing and I like to schedule meetings, coffees, and emails in the afternoon. By then, I am ready to be social and I already feel good about my accomplishments for the day.
Daniel Pink writes about this in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. The research backs up what many high performers already intuit. Timing isn’t a minor detail. It’s a strategic decision.
5. Do a weekly “stop doing” audit.
Most productivity systems focus on what to add: new habits, new tools, new routines. Ruthless prioritization is equally about subtraction. Once a week, ask yourself: what am I currently doing that I should stop? What commitments have I made that no longer serve my priorities? What’s on my plate because of inertia rather than intention?
This is uncomfortable because it requires admitting that past you made some questionable calls. But it is one of the most clarifying exercises I know, and freeing. Imagine staring down a week filled with meetings, but giving yourself the permission to decline some of them, opening up your calendar to far more important activities. Just thinking about that makes you feel more calm, doesn’t it?
The Payoff
Here’s what I’ve noticed when I actually practice this instead of just preaching it: things get done. Real things. Things that matter. And, of course, the #1 pushback I get on this is, “well, I don’t have that much control over my schedule.” And to that I say, you have far more agency than you think. Try canceling your biggest time waster for one week and see what happens.
When you stop spreading yourself across fifteen priorities, the one that remains starts to move. You get into flow states more. You feel less frazzled and more purposeful. And perhaps most surprisingly, you start to enjoy the work more because you’re doing work that actually aligns with what you care about.
McKeown’s central premise is that the disciplined pursuit of less is not a sacrifice. It’s a path to more meaning, more impact, and more of your actual life back. I believe that. I’ve experienced it. And I’m in the process of re-learning it right now.
Ruthless prioritization is not a one-time decision. It’s a practice. And like any practice, it requires showing up for it every day, even when it’s uncomfortable and even when saying no feels like too high a price.
Because the simple truth is that the price of saying yes to everything is much higher.