How to prioritize tasks when everything feels urgent

Method 1: the Eisenhower matrix

Split two questions we tend to blur: is it urgent? (a close deadline or someone waiting) and is it important? (it moves your goals forward or has serious consequences if skipped). Together they give four quadrants:

• Urgent and important: do it today. Example: the quote the client needs before Friday.
• Important, not urgent: schedule it. Example: planning next quarter's hiring.
• Urgent, not important: delegate it or deal with it in minimum time. Example: resending a document someone else can send.
• Neither: drop it. Example: newsletters, meetings where you add nothing.

The quadrant that changes everything

“Important, not urgent” is the most neglected quadrant and the most valuable: improving a process, looking after a key client, training someone on the team. If you never give it time, its tasks drift into the urgent quadrant, where they get done in a rush and badly. Block at least one fixed slot a week for it.

Method 2: three tasks a day

Each morning (or the evening before) pick at most three tasks that would make the day worthwhile if you finished them. At least one should be important but not urgent. Do them before opening email, or in your first uninterrupted block. Everything else is secondary.

Method 3: the weekly review

Thirty minutes on Friday or Monday to look at the week with some perspective:

• Empty every inbox: email, chat, notes, minutes.
• Review what you promised in meetings, and to whom.
• Look at the next two weeks in your calendar.
• Choose the week's three most important outcomes.
• Decide what you'll say no to or postpone.

Prioritising as a team

In a small team, the classic conflict is that each person gets requests from several directions. A few shared rules help a lot: who decides when priorities clash, which channels are for urgent matters (and which aren't), and that shared tasks always have a single owner and a date. That way, saying “I can't right now” stops being personal.

How to protect your priorities during the day

Choosing well in the morning doesn't help much if, by ten, you're dragged along by whatever arrives first. A few habits help you stick to the plan while still handling what genuinely can't wait:

• Block time in your calendar for your three tasks, as if they were meetings.
• Mute notifications during those blocks; anything truly urgent will come by phone.
• When a new request lands, ask “when do you need this by?” before saying yes.
• Batch small jobs (calls, short emails, admin) into a single block.
• At the end of the day, write down what's left and tomorrow's first task: you'll get started faster.

How Tessa automates it

The heaviest part of prioritising is gathering everything that's pending. Tessa does it for you: it turns requests from email, Slack, WhatsApp and meetings into tasks with a suggested priority and date, and closes the ones you've already dealt with. Every morning it sums up what's urgent.

The decision stays with you: change a priority and Tessa learns what's urgent for you. What's yours stays private; Tessa follows the work, not the people.