The blog

Last Sunday’s lesson in my ongoing course in structure in Sweden’s major morning paper Dagens Nyheter was about what we can do to prioritize in a more systematic way.

In English, it translates as follows:

“How to prioritize the right things

Prioritization is often about choosing what the right task to attend to right now is and thereby choosing not to do everything else. But when you need to set your priorities it will probably not be for the first time. Perhaps your workload has constantly increased over time as you have taken on more and greater responsibilities. You will then need to rid yourself of a few tasks. But which should you choose? What we can contribute to our company should be described by our goals. Allow for these goals to be your guiding star when setting your priorities.


Write down your primary goals. If you make sure to phrase them as concretely as possible and in such a way that it becomes easy to measure progress, it will be much easier to determine what constitutes an important task and what doesn’t. Decompose the goals into smaller parts which correspond to your role in the company.


Take a moment to consider what you spend your days doing. Try to identify tasks which undoubtedly contribute to achieving your goals. These are your most important tasks. Now identify the tasks which definitely do not contribute to the attainment of your goals. If you need to get rid of tasks, then these are the ones to choose. You can either stop doing them, delegate them to someone else or purchase a service which attends to the tasks.


Doing this will reduce your workload to a reasonable level and you will be able to spend more of your time doing the right things. “