Prioritizing when no one does it for you
Your manager says everything is important. The leadership team has five key goals for this year, and your department adds another three. Your inbox is full of requests that all need to be done “quickly”. And when you ask what comes first, you get a shrug: “You’re in the best position to judge that.” So you do a little bit of everything, and nothing completely. By the end of the week you’re tired, but you can’t really say where your energy went.
Sound familiar? Then you’re in good company. In many organizations, unclear priorities are the rule rather than the exception. Executive coach Amy Jen Su wrote a clear article about this in Harvard Business Review, titled How to Prioritize Your Work When Your Manager Doesn’t. In it, she refers to the well-known research by Robert Kaplan and David Norton: more than nine out of ten employees don’t fully understand their organization’s strategy, or don’t know exactly what is expected of them. And it’s no better at the top: executives also say they have too many priorities that clash with each other.
So the question isn’t whether you’ll face uncertainty. The question is how you can still set your own course, and go home feeling satisfied.
Prioritizing starts with you
Su’s first point is a firm one: don’t wait for someone else to set your priorities for you. It’s tempting to blame your workload on your manager or the organization, and sometimes part of the problem really does lie there. But if you see yourself only as someone who carries out tasks, you hand over the wheel. Consciously choosing where you spend your time is, in her view, one of the pillars of working successfully.
Two questions as a filter
Next, she advises against trying to weigh everything at once. Too many options paralyze us, and often lead to decisions that aren’t in our own interest. That’s why Su uses two questions. The first: where do I make my biggest contribution? Here you look at both what the organization needs and what you can uniquely add with your experience and talents. The second: what gives me energy? Motivation, after all, is the fuel that gets you moving.
Four boxes, four strategies
When you set those two questions against each other, you get four kinds of work. For each kind, Su describes its own approach.
High contribution, high energy: prioritize it. This is your sweet spot. Here you make a difference and enjoy doing it. These tasks deserve a fixed place in your calendar.
High contribution, low energy: tolerate it. Not every part of your job has to be fun. Sometimes it simply comes with your role, or you’re still learning and that’s why it feels hard. But Su also warns: if this box keeps growing, it may be a sign that your role no longer suits you.
Low contribution, high energy: elevate it. You enjoy something, but others don’t see the point. Then you can do two things. Show why it is valuable to the organization. Or be honest with yourself: are you diving into this because you like it, while it actually belongs to someone else?
Low contribution, low energy: give it away. Delegate it, say no to it, or drop it altogether. Su wryly notes that tasks that used to sit in your sweet spot can, over the years, end up in this box.
Make it visible in your calendar
Finally, she suggests looking back at your calendar for the past month: how much time went to each box? She gives her own appointments a color per quadrant, so she can see at a glance how her week is divided. Her conclusion, with a nod to Greg McKeown of Essentialism: if you don’t plan your time yourself, someone else will. And that someone won’t always have your best interests in mind.
Where I agree, and where I add a note
What I like about this model: it takes energy seriously. Many prioritization models only look at importance and urgency, as if you were a machine that enjoys every task equally. Su shows that enjoyment isn’t a luxury, but a factor that determines how good your work turns out. That fits seamlessly with how I look at working smarter.
Still, I’d add two notes.
The first is about ownership. Of course it helps to make your own choices. But unclear priorities aren’t only your problem. If nine out of ten people don’t know what’s expected of them, the organization has work to do as well. Taking ownership doesn’t mean putting everything on your own shoulders. It also means asking the question, starting the conversation, and naming where things rub.
The second is about the “give it away” box. Su writes for managers who have a team to delegate to. But many of the professionals I work with have no one to hand tasks over to. For them, that box means something else: batch those tasks, schedule them at a moment when your energy is low anyway, make agreements about them, or discuss with your manager whether they’re really necessary.
And perhaps most importantly: what gives you energy may drain your colleague. One person’s box is another person’s opposite box. So the model is a lens to look through, not a blueprint that works out the same for everyone.
What can you do differently tomorrow?
Take out your calendar from last week. Go through your appointments and tasks, and ask two questions for each item: did I really add something here? And did it give me energy, or cost me energy? You don’t have to change anything. Just seeing how your week was divided often gives a surprising insight. Maybe you’ll notice that your sweet spot barely got any room, or that you spent a lot of time on things that actually belong to someone else.
Then choose one task that is important, but costs you a lot of energy. Don’t ask yourself how to get rid of it, but how to make it lighter. Could you do it at a different time of day? Could you do it together with a colleague? Or could you link it to something you do enjoy?
And is there something you do with heart and soul, but whose value others don’t see? Then plan a short conversation with your manager. Explain what you see and why it benefits the organization. That’s how you take ownership in the way Su means it: not by carrying everything alone, but by starting the conversation yourself.
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