Sometimes it can be hard to figure out what your highest priority is. When this happens, instead of trying to decide what’s most important, decide what’s least important.
The change in perspective can help break log jams in your thinking. Deciding what isn’t important can also give you insight into what is important.
Eliminating items from your list helps reduce your mental overhead and increases focus when comparing your remaining to-dos.
When you have only 3 items, there are only 6 potential ways to order those items. But each additional item increases the number of combinations dramatically. There are 120 different ways to order 5 items and over 3 million ways to order 10 items.
One of the easiest ways to reduce the number of tasks you are prioritizing is to remove the low priority ones; they’re often easy to identify and require less analysis, since less is at stake.