Most Important Tasks

The problem it solves

Most working days start with the inbox, and the inbox tends to set the agenda for the rest of them. Each message is reasonable to answer and quick to deal with, and by the middle of the afternoon the day has been spent on other people's priorities, with the one piece of work that mattered still waiting for a clear hour that isn't coming.

A long to-do list doesn't help, and often makes things worse. With thirty items on it, finishing eight feels like a bad day, and which eight get done is decided less by importance than by which are quickest or least uncomfortable.

The idea

Each day, before the reactive work starts, pick one to three tasks that would make the day a success if they were the only things you finished. Those are the day's most important tasks, and they get done first, before email, chat and meetings have a chance at the time.

The name was circulating on productivity blogs by 2006, when Gina Trapani wrote on Lifehacker about choosing a daily most important task, and Leo Babauta's Zen Habits made the three-task version widely known the following year. The advice underneath is older. Brian Tracy's Eat That Frog!, from 2001, makes the same argument with a different image, borrowing a saying about eating a live frog first thing so that nothing worse can happen for the rest of the day. It's usually credited to Mark Twain, who has no good claim to it (the earliest version is Nicolas Chamfort's, from the 1790s, and involves a toad).

Enlarge: The important work goes first, before the day's messages get a vote.

A single working day drawn as a horizontal band from start to end. The first stretch holds three blocks numbered one to three, headed most important, and is fenced off from the rest. After it, smaller blocks of email, chat, meetings and requests crowd together until the end of the day, with arrows showing them pressing against the fence.

The important work goes first, before the day's messages get a vote.Close

The important work goes first, before the day's messages get a vote.

Two things make it work. The small number forces a choice, since three things can't all come first when there are thirty on the list, and a short list you finish tells you more about the day than a long one you don't. And going first takes the important work out of competition with the urgent work, instead of hoping it'll win a fair fight later in the day, which it usually doesn't.

How to use it

Choose the tasks the evening before or first thing, and before opening email, because whatever's in the inbox will otherwise nominate itself. Asking what you'd most want to have finished by the end of the day, if nothing else got done, tends to produce a better answer than asking what's most urgent.

Make each one finishable in the day, or at least a clear piece of something larger. Work on the migration plan can't be finished, while drafting the rollback section of it can.

Start the first one before anything reactive. A quick check for anything genuinely on fire is fine as long as it stays quick, and even an hour protected at the start of the day tends to cover the most important of the three.

At the end of the day, look at how many got done. Finishing none of them week after week is worth taking to your manager, because it usually means the role carries more reactive work than anybody has accounted for.

Where it breaks down

Every concept here has one. It is the section most summaries leave out.

Choosing them is the hard part, and the heuristic doesn't help. It says what to do with the most important tasks once you know what they are, and picking them is a prioritisation problem it leaves to you. It works best paired with something that does that job, such as the Eisenhower matrix or a short list of goals for the week.

Some roles can't go first thing. Support rotas, on-call duties and front-line roles often have their most important work arriving at fixed times or as it happens. The principle survives as protecting a block, with first meaning the first time you're reliably uninterrupted rather than the first hour of the day.

Three turns into seven. Given the chance, the list grows back into a to-do list, and people are consistently optimistic about how long tasks take. The discipline is in the number, and a day with seven most important tasks is a day where nothing was chosen.

It's a daily lens on work that isn't daily. Work that needs weeks of sustained effort, such as a research study, learning a new skill or a long piece of writing, can lose each day to something smaller that looks more important on that day. Without a weekly or longer view feeding the choice, the heuristic favours whatever can be finished by six o'clock.

Mornings aren't everybody's best hours. Alertness and concentration peak at different times of day for different people, so the advice to go first is really advice to go before the interruptions start, and Babauta himself treated the timing as a personal choice. For some people the quiet hours and the sharp hours coincide, and for others they don't.

In one line

Pick the one to three things that would make today a success on their own, and do them before the day's messages get a vote.