How do you prioritize? | Swizec Teller

How do you choose what to work on first? As an empowered engineer that’s a key skill.

This comes up a lot in 1on1’s with juniors.

They’re bombarded with random asks and struggle to focus. Your job as a lead is to say “Hey, I get it, focus on the current sprint, throw new stuff on the backlog. If someone gives you trouble, send them to me. If it feels like a fire, ping me and we’ll figure it out.”

PS: you can read and share this online

But how do you decide? Maybe a product manager decides for you. That’s nice when you’re on a team, but as you grow towards senior+ you lose that protection. You’re expected to work on (and coordinate) long-term initiatives on your own.

Now what?

I like the Eisenhower matrix.

Do the urgent and important immediately. This is like a production fire. You gotta drop everything.

Delegate the urgent and not important. This can be to yourself later when you have “take care of things” time. I do this a lot.

Make space for the important but not urgent. All your long-term projects fall in this area. These are the easiest to let slip.

Drop all the balls that don’t need juggling. As the fantastic Four Thousand Weeks argues: You have to do less.

This sounds easy and obvious. The part nobody tells you is that it’s hard.

The thing nobody tells you about the Eisenhower matrix is how hard it is to do in practice.

Yeah sure just say No to Urgent and focus on Important.

But each of those Urgent asks has a person attached. And they know your slack handle. pic.twitter.com/vM7VUY8rSL

— Swizec Teller (@Swizec) January 29, 2025

Each of those Urgent asks has a person with a frowny face attached and they know your slack handle. You have to say No right in their face. This sucks.

The best solution I’ve found is to turn No into Not Yet. This lands better. Especially when paired with an approximate When.

Another good strategy is to ask z not y questions and dig deeper into what’s going on. With luck, there’s an Important problem hiding in there and you can solve a bunch of Urgent asks by doing 1 Important thing.

Cheers,
~Swizec