Relentless Execution Needs Ruthless Prioritisation

Or, why doing great work doesn’t mean putting your best effort in every task

Jun 26, 2022

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Q: How do we decide where to put most of our time and effort?

There’s a scene in David Fincher’s The Social Network where Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg gets distracted in the middle of a deposition.

“It’s raining,” he says, almost to himself. The lawyer is taken by surprise. “I’m sorry?” “It just started raining,” Zuckerberg replies.

“Mr. Zuckerberg, do I have your full attention?”

“No!”

“Do you think I deserve it?”

Zuckerberg replies by saying that since he is under oath, he is legally obligated to say the truth.

“You have part of my attention, you have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, are intellectually or creatively capable of doing.”

I’ve watched The Social Network 10–15 times and each time I’m blown away by this scene. Not because of the character’s cocky and condescending tone (which is a treat to watch indeed), but because he knows something that we don’t.

At this point, it might feel that the deposition is the most important thing in Zuckerberg’s life, but in the grand scheme of things, it means nothing. He doesn’t care if he loses or wins — it’s a chore — so he gives his minimum attention to it, diverting the maximum of his attention to the high-leverage tasks at the offices of Facebook.

I love this scene, and especially this dialogue, because it teaches a big lesson on prioritisation.

Today, let’s talk about prioritisation. That very problem that has befuddled us for years (if not decades) and that every other online article claims to have solved (but almost always to no avail).

I consciously avoid being prescriptive about the ideas I share. My usual intention is to help you look at things from a different perspective, without exactly telling you how to do it.

I’m gonna make an exception this time.

We do 1,000 big and small tasks every day. All tasks are not equal. Some have high-impact, while others are mere chores. It doesn’t make sense to put equal effort in all of them. That’s obvious — but we often forget that.

Doing great work means deliberately NOT putting your best effort in every task.

The sole objective of “prioritisation” is to identify what’s what so that you can give your maximum time and effort to the high-leverage tasks and just barely finish the chores. This is how you do great work — there’s literally no other way.

This is very obvious when you are running a startup. Your only priority is to ship. You shouldn’t worry about design or code. They are chores.

Nothing has to be perfect when you are just starting. In fact, nothing should be perfect in a startup. Perfection will kill you. You should deliberately do a bad job as long as it gets the job done fast.

Relentless execution needs ruthless prioritisation.

But, this isn’t super clear in your day-to-day life when you ass isn’t constantly on the line. When you are not fighting fires everyday, the feedback is either late or ambiguous. Hence, you try to do every task with equal love and effort (except when you are doing dishes and paying taxes).

Every big chunk of work can be broken down into multiple pieces. The problem with perfectionists is that they give everything they do equal importance. This is a sheer wastage of time and effort. It’s also a sign that you are too afraid to prioritise.

You become egalitarian perfectionists. While it doesn’t kill you immediately, it does make you ineffective in the long run. Like a poison.

Remember, you have limited time and effort. It only makes sense to apply them in the right place.

There are three types of tasks, and depending on what type of task it is, you have to decide how much you want to invest.

High-leverage tasks are where you let your inner perfectionist shine. If you don’t do them well, the opportunity cost is high. When done well, they give you 10x return. For example, making an investment plan is a high-leverage task; prepping for a job interview is a high leverage task; planning to buy a house is a high-leverage task.

Low-leverage tasks are where you do a strictly “good” job, no more, no less. They give you as much as you put in. There’s little or no leverage. For example, making a travel plan is a low-leverage job. Even if you make a great plan (after spending countless hours in research), your overall experience won’t improve drastically.

Chores are where you do the bare minimum. They have no leverage, but you have to do them out of compulsion. If I have to be more direct, chores are where you actively try not to do a good job. For example, making a list of groceries to buy. It won’t kill you even if you miss some.

To put it into practice, prefix every task in your todo list with H: or L: or C: depending on what type of task it is, so you could force yourself to be intentional about your level of effort.

Also, assign the number of minutes or hours you want to spend on each task — and stick to it. Timeboxing is underrated, but nothing gets the job done better.

On top of that, do the H tasks when your energy and focus is the highest. For me, that’s usually early in the morning or late at night — when everybody is asleep and there’s pindrop silence.

Do the L and C tasks the rest of the time. Listen to music or, as my partner does, watch The Big Bang Theory in the background just to get through the list.

Despite this framework, I should mention that “prioritisation” is hard. Often you wouldn’t know if something should be high-leverage or a chore. You will never have complete information — and that’s okay.

Prioritisation is about finding a way to get the most important things done well, without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances.

As a rule of thumb, try to look at the opportunity cost when stuck in a conundrum. If you don’t do something or, even worse, do a shoddy job, what’s the opportunity cost? If you make a bad investment plan or, don’t prepare well for a client meeting or, pick the wrong house to buy, or select the wrong partner to marry, the cost is very high.

In comparison to the above, an okay travel plan or, an okay restaurant you picked for dinner or, an okay dish you made (unless you are a chef) or, an incomplete grocery list don’t matter much.

Prioritisation is relative. What seems urgent and important on its own can become a “chore” when compared to another.

For Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, the deposition was not even a low-leverage task, it was a chore. In the grand scheme of things, given the potential of Facebook and how big it could be, this deposition was puny. It deserved his minimum attention.

Timeless Insight

It’s a common belief that our ideas shape our actions, but often our actions shape our ideas as well.

Often you’ll see yourself doing something and, unable to pin down a motive, you’ll try to make sense of it by constructing a plausible story. Then you form beliefs about yourself based on the story you fabricated.

People often develop their attitudes by observing their own behaviour and concluding what attitudes must have caused them.

What I’m Reading

The temptation to lead as a chess master, controlling each move of the organization, must give way to an approach as a gardener, enabling rather than directing. A gardening approach to leadership is anything but passive. The leader acts as an “Eyes-On, Hands-Off” enabler who creates and maintains an ecosystem in which the organization operates.

— General Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams