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How to Get Control of Your Priorities
About this Episode
“If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it?
In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days.
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Script | 405
Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few.
The question is: why are they overdue?
You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them.
This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user.
The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control?
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix).
Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes.
And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion?
Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.
As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it.
With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag.
When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned.
Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that.
Now, this is where many people go wrong.
It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it.
Not true.
Priorities change.
You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now?
Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen.
Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposal is on hold for a few months, so there is no urgency. But new priorities will come along, don’t you worry.
This is why adding your flags should be done at a daily planning level.
Now I will caveat that.
There are times when I know something will be the priority for the day. The script for this podcast, for instance, is today’s priority. I knew that when I planned the week, and I flagged it. It doesn’t matter what other things pop up through the week; when it comes to writing this script, it’s the priority for the day.
Your core work will always be a priority. This is why I have people spend time working out what their core work is. After all, your core work is the reason you are employed. If you didn’t do your core work consistently, you would not have a job for very long.
Even retired people need to consider what their core activities will be each day.
I’m reminded of this following a conversation I had with my father-in-law over the weekend. We’ve just had the lunar New Year here in Korea, and my parents-in-law stayed with us over the holiday.
During that time, my father-in-law mentioned he planned to hang up his silicone gun and tiling trowel at the end of the year. He fits bathrooms and was thinking about what he would do when he no longer needs to wake up at 5:00 am each morning.
The first thing I said was that he needs to prioritise exercise. His job ensures he’s getting plenty of exercise. Walking up and down stairs carrying sinks, shower kits and tiles is hard physical work. His job currently ensures he’s getting his exercise.
The moment he stops doing that five days a week, he will need to find a replacement activity to prevent muscle loss.
Losing his muscle mass will lead to him losing his independence very quickly.
We all have priorities that recur. Those tasks can be pre-flagged. They are critical, whether you are working or retired. Having a few tasks already prioritised helps you plan the day, since you can decide whether they will be the priority or not.
Let me explain.
All of us are limited by the same thing each day. Time. It’s the one thing none of us can change. Writing this podcast script takes about 2 to 2.5 hours. That eats a big chunk of my work time each week.
At the same time, we all have to deal with communications, meetings, admin and other day-to-day tasks. I need to include an hour each day for taking Louis for his walk, and next week, he also has a grooming appointment, which will take time out of my week.
Looking at next week’s calendar today, I can see where my appointments are and already guess which tasks will be a priority. When I do my weekly planning, I pre-flag what I think will be the priority for each day, but I am aware that when I do daily planning, I may need to change it. There has to be a degree of flexibility.
It could be that I get an email on Monday asking for a proposal to work with a company and design a workshop for them. That would become a priority for that week.
I would add a task, “Begin work on company workshop”, and schedule it. Yet, I would not flag it then. When the day comes, and I do my daily planning, I then get to see the real landscape of my day.
It could be that I have five hours of meetings that day and two or three pre-planned, prioritised tasks. Now I have to make a decision. What is my REAL priority that day?
If I have promised to get the workshop outline to the client by the end of the week, that will be my red-flagged task that day. I made a promise, and I will deliver on that promise.
Given that I have five hours of meetings and need two hours to put together the outline and proposal, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else that day. I need to re-prioritise my day.
So I add the flag to the workshop’s proposal and decide on what needs to be rescheduled.
It’s likely that, in that given scenario, I would not flag anything else. I know I don’t have time to do much else.
This is why daily and weekly planning complement each other. The weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives. The daily plan is about ensuring you prioritise your day so you work towards meeting those objectives—given the new information, ie, new tasks that will inevitably come in.
Now I know many of you will add a flag to a task because you keep rescheduling it and just do not want to spend the time doing it. The thinking goes that if you flag it, you will do the task. Hmmm, how often does that work?
This is often the reason many flagged tasks become overdue. The only change is that the task now has a flag. Yet you still don’t want to spend the time doing it.
When you use your daily planning time to prioritise your day, you’re using real, up-to-date information to guide you. You can remove flags from tasks you thought were important but are no longer, and add a flag to the tasks that are important that day.
I mentioned that you can pre-prioritise your week by flagging tasks at the weekly planning session. When you do the daily planning, you decide if your priorities have changed and, if so, remove flags or reschedule those tasks.
What I like about this approach is that it feels like your task manager is supporting you rather than the other way around. You retain control over what you will and will not do each day.
This works particularly well if you find yourself behind on something or have a backlog that needs dealing with. When you plan the day, you get to decide what to place on your task list and in what order.
Now, how many flags should you allow each day?
Several years ago, I decided to find out how many tasks I could consistently do each day for a week. I began with fifteen and soon discovered that if I wanted to be consistent, then that number was ten.
This number does not include routine tasks such as cleaning my actionable email, my daily admin tasks and the usual things we all have to do at work each day.
When it came to flagged tasks, I soon discovered that I could consistently do two important tasks a day. When I tried three or more, I frequently was unable to do one of them. I just ran out of time.
And so, my 2+8 Prioritisation Method was born.
This method forces you to realistically prioritise your day. You can choose only two must-do tasks for the day. These are flagged. The remaining eight are not flagged, and you will do what you can to clear that list each day.
This method works because it introduces constraints into your system.
Given that it’s human nature to want to do more than we can realistically do each day, adding this constraint of no more than ten tasks per day ensures you are picking the genuinely important tasks.
No, that interesting YouTube video is not important. You can watch that any time. But renewing your father’s prescription for him is.
Checking your car’s tyre pressures before you head out on a long road trip this afternoon will be a priority over reading that article your colleague sent you.
I have my Todoist set up so I can see my red-flagged tasks each day using a filter. That filter is “today & P1”.
Each morning, before I begin my day, that’s the first place I go. I review my flagged tasks and remove any excess.
This has taught me to become ruthlessly competent at prioritising.
Strangely, this goes back to something I learned in my teenage years. In Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, he writes about establishing your governing values. Today. I think of these as my Areas of Focus.
These governing values are the predetermined priorities in your life. Often, family will be at the top of that list. The idea is that your governing values have a natural prioritised list. For example, if your family’s well-being is above your career, if your family needs you to do something, that will be prioritised over your work commitments.
For me, my health and fitness is above my work in my list of areas of focus. This means I will not schedule meetings at 4:30 pm. That’s my exercise time. I will not do any work at that time either. At 4:30 pm, I exercise.
So there you go, Caroline. I hope that has helped. The key is to prioritise your day during your daily planning and use that time to reset your flags so nothing is ever overdue.
And above all, respect your flags. If you know you will not be doing a flagged task on any given day. Either reschedule the task or remove the flag.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Hosts & Guests
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