How to plan your day around three priorities

To plan your day around three priorities, pick the three tasks that would make today a success, write them down before you open your inbox, and give the most important one your best hours. Everything else, like email, meetings and small requests, fits around them. Three is few enough to finish and enough to make real progress, which is why so many productivity methods land on the same number.

Why three

A to-do list of 25 items feels productive to write and miserable to work from. You pick the easy items, the important ones slide to tomorrow, and the day ends with a long list and a vague sense of failure.

Three priorities change the question from "how much can I do?" to "what matters most?". If you finish them, the day was good, whatever else happened.

The method

1. Choose the night before, or first thing

Before you open email or messages, ask: "If I only finish three things today, which three would make the biggest difference?" Write them down.

2. Make each one concrete

"Work on the report" is a fog. "Write the introduction and the first section of the report" is a task you can start and finish.

3. Do the hardest one first

Put priority one into your best hours, which is the morning for most people. Protect that block: notifications off, distracting tabs parked. More in how to focus in Chrome.

4. Fit the rest around them

Meetings, email and small tasks go into the gaps. Batch them where you can; each switch has a cost (see the real cost of context switching).

5. Review in two minutes

At the end of the day, tick off what you finished and carry over what you didn't. If a priority keeps carrying over, it's either too big (split it) or not really a priority (drop it).

Keep your priorities next to your work

The best place for your three priorities is somewhere you'll see them all day, not in a notebook in a drawer. For browser-based work, that means beside your tabs.

TabHue 2.0, arriving in December, adds Tasks: a short list in Chrome's side panel, right beside your work. Attach the page you're on to a task, start a focus session on it with one click, and tick it off when it's done; finished tasks count towards your pet's daily quests. Right-click any page and choose Add this page to Tasks to capture it. Details in Tasks, reminders and snoozed tabs.

Today, you can already pair your list with TabHue's Focus mode: write your three, then park your distracting categories while you work on the first.

Frequently asked questions

What if something urgent comes up?

Deal with it, then ask whether it replaces one of your three or pushes one to tomorrow. Being flexible is fine; what matters is choosing on purpose.

Should my three priorities all be work?

Not necessarily. On some days one of them might be "go for a run" or "call my sister". The method works for whatever you decide matters.

How is this different from time blocking?

They work well together. Three priorities decide what matters; time blocking decides when you'll do it. Choose your three, then give each a block in your calendar.