Order the six tasks by genuine importance, not urgency

Rank your six tasks from most to least important — and keep that order fixed through the day.

Why it works

Urgency and importance are not the same thing, but they compete for the same attention. Without a pre-set order, people default to the most urgent task in the moment, which is often not the most important. Setting the priority sequence the evening before — when emotional urgency from the current day is not distorting judgment — exploits the temporal separation between planning and execution to give importance the advantage over urgency.

How to do it

1. When writing the six tasks, ask for each one: "If I could only do one thing tomorrow, would this be it?" Let the answer determine the sequence.
2. Treat the sequence as a commitment, not a suggestion — it exists precisely to prevent in-the-moment reprioritization based on what feels urgent.
3. If a genuine emergency overrides the list, acknowledge it explicitly rather than just drifting into a different task.

Evidence

The importance-urgency distinction is foundational to the Eisenhower matrix and empirically grounded in findings that people systematically over-weight urgency relative to importance (the mere urgency effect, Zhu & Yang). Pre-commitment to a priority sequence is a strategy to counteract this bias. (observational)

The mere urgency effect is documented; whether pre-committing to a priority list reliably counteracts it in practice is not independently tested.

Sources

• Zhu & Yang (2021), the mere urgency effect, Journal of Consumer Research

Common mistake

Ordering by urgency rather than importance when writing the list — which defeats the point and simply transfers the daily urgency bias to the evening.