How to Prioritize a Long List of Items

How’s your To-Do list? Is it growing? Are you able to use it to accomplish the most important things? Do you find yourself at the end of the day with several things completed, but several more important things still nestled at the bottom of the list?

I get it. I am a list-maker. I rarely meet a list I don’t love. I have a “pack for vacation” list; a list of things for my husband to know in the event I’m incapacitated; a list of people I’m praying for along with their specific needs; a list of activities that are appropriate for your Youth evenings; and the quintessential To-Do list. And yes, it grows. I add things to the bottom of the list and I cross things off the top of the list. The problem with just working the list top-to-bottom, though, is that some of the things that I add to the bottom of the list may be more important than some of the things above them. I need to reorder them, which is easy when the list is five items. When you get to 20, you may be able to identify the top three, but beyond that, it can get really tough. And yes, I often have 20 or more items on my daily tasker.  And no, I never expect to get through the entire list in one day. I can’t remember the last time I completed a To-Do list, but that’s never the point of my list. The point of my list is to do the things that matter most while not letting lesser things fall off my radar.

How Can I Put First Things First?

I don’t try to prioritize 20 items all at once. I’ve got an easier way. It’s time consuming at first, but it’s also kind of a relaxing activity. It involves only ever comparing two items at once, because it’s usually pretty easy to identify which of two items is more important. If it’s a choice between something with a deadline and something without a deadline, the “with a deadline” item usually wins. Sometimes what I have to do is trick myself into making a choice. I tell myself, “I can only do one of these items today, but I’ll be able to do it from start to finish. Which one do I do?” Yes, even if I know I won’t complete either one, I still use this as a visualization tool.

Now I’ll explain the mechanics of it. Write down every task you would like to accomplish in a perfect world. You’ll trim it later. Number them from top to bottom, not in priority order, just from top to bottom. Start with item one. Read it in your mind, picture yourself doing the thing, or picture it completed. Look at item two. Is number one or number two more important to do right now? If you can only do one of them, but you’ll be able to fully complete it, which one do you do? On a separate piece of paper or in a blank space on the page of items, write that number. Now look at item three. Compare item one with item 3, and go through the same exercise of determining which of just those two items is more important, and write that number next to the one you wrote earlier. Move on to item four, and compare item one with item four, and go through the exercise with just those two items, and write that number next to the other two. Complete through the entire list. You’re not done yet – not even close.

When you’ve finished comparing item one with every other item on the list, make some kind of mark next to it so you know you’ve finished it. Now we’re going to compare item two with item three, then item four, then item five, and so on, until you have compared item two individually with every other item on the list and noted in that blank area which item “won.” Then you move to item three and compare it with all the other items starting with item four. You don’t need to compare two with one, or three with one or three with two, because you’ve already done them. Comparing one with three is the same as comparing three with one, so you only need to do one of those.

After you’ve finished the comparisons of one item to one other item, it’s time to count the numbers. How many 1’s did you have? They’ll all be grouped at the top of the list. Put that number next to item 1, and go and count each of the other numbers. You’ll miss some the first time through – I always do, and I have to go back and change one or two.

Now you’re going to put them in order from greatest number of tallies to the least. You will probably have one item with one fewer tallies than the total number of items on your list, and you’ll probably have one item that has zero tallies. If not, that’s fine, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong, it just means that you’re going to see some items with the same number of tallies, and that’s fine as well. If you have two items that have the same number of tallies, you can just compare them again. When that happens, I give the one I deem higher priority as A and the other one as B.

Now it’s time to rewrite the list in the priority order you’ve discovered. This works easier on a computer than by hand, because you can cut-and-paste the items into order. Your new item number one is the item with the greatest number of tallies, and on down the list.

If you do this daily, you’ll find some things moving up the list, and you may eventually look at an item that never seems to move up the list and never gets done and decide it’s time to let it fall off the list. But you’ll find that, after a while, you can look at the top several items on the list and just know that they’re your new top priorities, and just draw a line under them and start with the ones that you aren’t sure where they belong. Another thing you can do is just do the ones above the line and not even bother to reprioritize until those above the line are done.

It’s probably not a perfect system, and I’m sure it’s not something everyone wants to be bothered doing, but it works for me, especially when I have to balance a day of work, church, business, and personal tasks. Give it a shot and let me know how it works for you! If you have something different that you use, I’d like to know about that, too.