Strategic prioritisation: how to decide what actually deserves your time

Effective prioritisation: the second tool in our leadership toolkit

Gemma and I have picked our second tool for the strategic toolkit we're building this series, and it's effective prioritisation. It might sound a bit basic at first, we all learn some version of time management early in our careers, but I think it's genuinely one of the most important strategic skills there is. We're never going to be asked to do less. Whatever level you're at, there's always going to be more coming down the line than there is right now, so getting better and better at working out what actually deserves your time is a skill you'll never regret sharpening.

Why this belongs in the strategic toolkit, not just the basics

There's an eternal quest for busyness that a lot of senior leaders get caught in, ticking through longer and longer to-do lists, often in what Gemma nicely described as sleepwalk mode rather than truly intentional mode. I used to work somewhere where everyone's time was billable, and the more senior you got, the higher your hourly rate went. It really focuses the mind on whether an hour of your thinking is worth spending on this rather than that, even outside a billable environment.

I talk a lot in my team coaching work about the hamster wheel of operational handle turning, that busy, firefighting mode where you're running to stand still. Whenever I ask teams how much time they should be spending off that hamster wheel in more strategic thinking, the answer is always more than they currently manage. Sometimes people think they should be spending 80 per cent of their time in that thinking space and are actually closer to 20. That gap alone is worth a proper conversation with your manager or leadership team.

The Eisenhower matrix, and the corner that matters most

The first tool is a classic, and for good reason. It's a simple two by two that sorts your work by whether it's important and whether it's urgent.

Urgent and important is crisis management, firefighting, the stuff with a hard deadline. Not urgent but important is where the real strategic work lives: evolving a strategy, planning a roadmap, thinking through something genuinely complex. If you don't protect space for this box, everything eventually ends up in the urgent and important one instead, and the quality of your thinking under real time pressure is never as good. I like to capture messy, half formed thoughts on things I know I don't need to act on for months, because coming back to them later, once my brain has quietly chewed them over, means I'm already partway there.

Not important but urgent is the does this have to be me box. Somebody hands you their monkey, to borrow the phrase, and the real question is whether you can hand it back, delegate it, or even get AI or some other automation to take it off your plate. And not important, not at all urgent, is where the genuinely low value stuff lives. I've got a great, slightly painful example of this. Years ago I inherited a small team, and one very busy junior team member was spending most of her week producing a detailed weekly report for a client. When I actually asked the client whether they used it, they said honestly, no, if we need to know something we just call you. That was close to a full time role's worth of effort going into something that delivered no value at all.

The impact effort matrix: what's actually worth doing

The second tool plots tasks or ideas by effort and impact. Low effort, high impact is your low hanging fruit, the stuff you want to prioritise and build momentum with. High effort, low impact is what Gemma calls the thankless tasks, the fully polished policy document nobody ever reads.

I've used this one for whittling down ideas after a workshop, when you've got twenty five post-its and a room full of good intentions and need an honest filter for what's actually worth taking forward. Gemma's used it at a bigger scale, working out which initiatives will actually deliver a strategic aim, and in post-acquisition change work, where it maps neatly onto the idea of quick wins that change management models like Kotter's build in deliberately, because visible early progress builds trust and momentum for the bigger, harder changes still to come.

The question that cuts through it all

One extra thing I'd add, more of a coaching question than a model, is this: what are the things that only I can do? It's a genuinely useful way of examining whether you're holding onto tasks because you have to, or because letting go feels uncomfortable. There's often a bit of ego wrapped up in delegation, wanting to be seen as across everything, involved in every decision. Being secure enough to say that's not mine to hold onto anymore is a real leadership skill in itself, and it's usually the not urgent but important work, investing time now in training someone else up, that frees you from doing the same task in the urgent corner over and over again.

Worth a listen if...

You suspect you're spending more time firefighting than you'd like to admit, and want a proper framework for thinking about it.

You're trying to work out which projects or ideas genuinely deserve your team's effort, rather than just the ones that are loudest.

You've ever caught yourself holding onto a task you know someone else could do, and want to understand why.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.