How to Decide What to Work on When Everything Feels Urgent

When everything demands your attention, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and stuck. The key to overcoming this is learning how to prioritize effectively. Here’s how you can sort through the noise and focus on what matters most:

• Recognize urgency traps: Avoid mistaking busyness for progress. Tasks that feel immediate aren’t always impactful.
• Set clear goals: Define a primary objective (e.g., growing revenue by a specific amount) and align your tasks with it.
• Use prioritization frameworks: Tools like the ICE or RICE scoring methods help you rank tasks based on impact, confidence, effort, and reach.
• Focus on growth drivers: Prioritize tasks that improve activation, monetization, or retention.
• Adopt daily and weekly routines: Start each day with one critical task and review priorities weekly to stay on track.
• Leverage tools: Apps like Onsara can help reduce decision fatigue and guide you toward actionable next steps.

The solution isn’t doing more - it’s doing the right things. By using structured decision-making and building simple habits, you can shift from reactive work to impactful progress.

Adora Cheung - How to Prioritize Your Time

Identify the Problem

Before tackling constant urgency, it's important to recognize how it seeps into your daily work. Many people don’t even realize they’re stuck in this cycle until they pause and take a closer look at their habits.

Common Urgency Traps

There are several traps that make urgency feel like productivity when, in reality, it’s not.

One major trap is confusing activity with progress. For example, you might spend an entire day responding to emails, attending meetings, and handling endless messages. While you look busy, you may not actually move forward on the projects that matter most.

Another trap is the "Mere-Urgency Effect", a tendency to prioritize tasks simply because they feel immediate, even when they lack long-term value. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research found this bias to be especially common among people who identify as "busy" individuals.

For SaaS teams, overloaded roadmaps are another challenge. When leadership treats every request as equally urgent, the result is chaos - if everything is a priority, then nothing truly is.

What Constant Urgency Costs You

Living in a constant state of urgency creates a reactive culture where immediate demands overshadow thoughtful planning. Instead of focusing on meaningful, strategic work, you end up firefighting. This approach stifles innovation and limits productivity.

Rushed decisions often lead to poor results and expensive mistakes. By focusing only on what’s right in front of you, you may miss valuable opportunities that require deeper thought and long-term planning.

For SaaS teams, this reactive pattern can be particularly damaging. When teams are stuck in shallow, reactive work, they struggle to make progress on critical initiatives like refining pricing strategies or improving activation flows. These missed opportunities can have a direct impact on revenue and growth.

Check If You Have Urgency Overload

To determine if you’re caught in the urgency trap, ask yourself these questions:

• Do unplanned tasks consume a large part of your day, throwing off your schedule?
• Are frequent interruptions making it hard to focus on deep, sustained work?
• Can you clearly identify your top three priorities? If your priorities are vague or constantly shifting, it’s a sign that urgent demands may be driving your workload.

"I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Answering these questions can help you pinpoint the urgent tasks that are pulling you away from what truly matters. Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward breaking free from the cycle of constant urgency.

Define What Actually Matters

Once you recognize the cycle of constantly reacting to what feels urgent, the next step is to focus on tasks that genuinely deserve your attention. Without a clear system, it's easy to fall back into making reactive decisions.

Start by clarifying your focus before diving into frameworks. This ensures each decision aligns with your broader goals.

Pick Your Primary Goal

Begin by identifying one main goal that comes with a measurable target. For example, setting a SMART goal - like increasing monthly recurring revenue from $50,000 to $60,000 by March 31, 2026 - can simplify decision-making.

Use a North Star Metric to guide you. These are single metrics or actions that reflect your core customer value. For instance, if your North Star metric is the number of users completing their first key action, then tasks that improve onboarding should take priority.

When setting this primary goal, make it SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. A vague goal like "grow the business" won’t help much. But a clear objective like "increase monthly recurring revenue from $50,000 to $60,000 by March 31, 2026" gives you a precise target to work toward.

Once you’ve defined your main goal, ensure every task you take on supports a key growth driver.

Link Tasks to Growth Drivers

Align your tasks with measurable growth areas to make sure everything you work on contributes to your primary goal. This approach helps you differentiate between experiments that can drive progress and routine tasks that simply maintain operations.

For SaaS teams, this means asking questions like: Does this task help more users reach their "aha moment" (activation)? Does it increase how much customers pay or how often they pay (monetization)? Does it improve user engagement over time (retention)? If a task doesn’t clearly support one of these growth drivers, it might not be worth prioritizing.

This way, you can separate high-impact experiments from everyday maintenance. While maintenance tasks are necessary, your focus should remain on activities that drive activation, monetization, or retention.

Create Simple Decision Rules

Once your goals and growth drivers are clear, use straightforward decision-making tools to objectively evaluate tasks. The ICE framework - Impact, Confidence, and Effort - is a great way to cut through the noise.

• Impact measures how much a task will contribute to your primary goal.
• Confidence reflects how sure you are about your estimates, helping you avoid basing decisions on guesswork.
• Effort considers the time and resources needed to complete the task.

Score each task from 1 to 10 on these three factors, then calculate a priority score to decide what to tackle first.

The RICE method adds Reach to the mix, assessing how many users or customers will benefit. This ensures you don’t spend weeks on something that only helps a small group.

Both frameworks push you to consider the real impact of your choices before committing time and energy.

If decision fatigue or task overload is a challenge, tools like Onsara can help. It uses AI and cognitive task analysis to guide you on what to prioritize and, most importantly, how to get started - especially when everything feels equally pressing.

Use Prioritization Frameworks

Once your goals and growth drivers are clear, prioritization frameworks can help you focus on what really matters, cutting through the noise of competing tasks.

Effort vs. Impact Matrix

The Effort vs. Impact Matrix is a straightforward tool that organizes tasks based on how much effort they require and the impact they deliver. Picture a two-by-two chart where tasks fall into one of four categories:

• High Impact, Low Effort: These "Quick Wins" should be your top priority.
• High Impact, High Effort: These "Big Projects" need strategic planning and resources.
• Low Impact, Low Effort: These "Fill-ins" are great for downtime.
• Low Impact, High Effort: These tasks are best avoided or reconsidered.

For instance, streamlining a user onboarding flow is a high-impact, low-effort task, making it an ideal quick win. On the other hand, a complete overhaul of your pricing model is high-impact but also high-effort, requiring careful planning. Tasks like updating team bios or fixing minor UI bugs fall into the low-impact, low-effort category, while building a feature that no one uses is a classic example of low-impact, high-effort work.

You can create this matrix using a whiteboard, a shared document, or even by snapping a quick photo for your team. Tools like Miro, Figma's FigJam, and GroupMap offer templates to help teams brainstorm, group, and prioritize tasks collaboratively.

Once you've mapped your tasks, you can refine your focus further with the MoSCoW method.

MoSCoW Method

The MoSCoW method categorizes tasks or features into four groups: Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, and Won't-have.

• Must-haves: These are the essentials. Without them, the product can't meet its core purpose.
• Should-haves: These are important but not critical. They enhance functionality or the user experience.
• Could-haves: These are nice-to-have features that you’ll tackle if time and resources allow.
• Won’t-haves: These are features you’ve consciously decided to exclude for now.

Start by listing all potential features or tasks, then assign each to a category based on your business goals and product needs. This method ensures you're focusing on what matters most while acknowledging secondary priorities.

RICE Scoring

For a more numbers-driven approach, the RICE scoring model helps rank tasks by calculating their impact relative to the effort required. The formula is simple: RICE = (Reach × Impact × Confidence) / Effort.

Here’s how each factor breaks down:

• Reach: How many users or customers will benefit from the task?
• Impact: How much will it contribute to your primary goal?
• Confidence: How certain are you about your estimates? This helps reduce reliance on guesswork.
• Effort: How much time and how many resources will it take to complete?

For example, simplifying a signup flow might score highly across all categories - high reach (affects all new users), high impact (boosts activation), high confidence (backed by user research), and low effort (minimal development time). On the other hand, a pricing experiment might have a smaller reach but still deliver meaningful results for monetization.

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Build a Daily and Weekly Routine

Simple routines can transform prioritization frameworks into practical, repeatable systems. By integrating these strategies into your daily and weekly habits, you can maintain focus and consistently move toward your goals.

Start Each Day with Triage

Kick off each morning by identifying one critical task that will make the biggest impact on your most important goal. This isn't about crafting a flawless to-do list - it’s about pinpointing the one thing that truly matters today and dedicating your peak productivity hours to it.

For maximum efficiency, plan this top task the night before to sidestep morning decision fatigue. Whether you prepare in advance or decide in the moment, the principle remains the same: make a single decision, then act on it. For instance, if your focus is on user activation, your task might involve improving a signup flow. If monetization is your priority, you could analyze results from a recent pricing test. The key is to commit to this one task during the hours when you're at your best.

Review Priorities Weekly

A weekly review helps you stay aligned with your bigger objectives and prevents urgent, smaller tasks from derailing your strategy. Dedicate 30 minutes every Monday or Tuesday to reflect on these questions: What did I achieve? Where do I stand? What’s next? Where do I need assistance?

This isn't about revisiting old work for the sake of it. Instead, it's an opportunity to recalibrate based on new insights and refocus on strategic tasks. For example, maybe customer feedback uncovered an unexpected issue with onboarding, or a pricing experiment didn’t yield the results you hoped for. Weekly reviews give you the chance to adjust priorities before wasting another week on activities that don’t align with your goals. Use a bowler chart to track key metrics - this makes spotting trends quick and straightforward.

Use Tools to Reduce Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue can sap your energy and cloud your judgment. Streamlining your tools and processes can help you conserve mental energy for the tasks that matter most.

Onsara is a great example of a tool designed to tackle this issue. Instead of overwhelming you with endless task lists, it uses AI and cognitive task analysis to guide you toward the next logical step. It’s perfect for those moments when everything feels urgent, breaking down the "I have too much to do and don’t know where to start" paralysis into a single, manageable action.

Apply This to SaaS Work

The strategies and methods outlined here aren't just theoretical - they're built for the fast-paced world of SaaS, where you're constantly balancing pricing experiments, onboarding tweaks, and retention strategies. Here's how to put them into action when everything feels equally pressing.

Prioritize Pricing Experiments

When you’re staring at a long list of potential pricing changes - like adding a new tier, testing annual discounts, or tweaking feature limits - turn to the DRICE framework. Start by giving each idea a quick DRICE score. Then, spend 30 minutes on the top ideas to outline a clear hypothesis and estimate the potential revenue impact.

Take this example: one team used DRICE to assess the idea of adding PayPal as a payment option. They projected a 2.7% boost in conversions, translating to an extra $540,000 in annual revenue. With just 1.5 weeks of engineering work, the return was $360,000 per engineering week - elevating what seemed like a minor idea into a top priority. Always ask, “What’s the smallest amount of work we need to test this?” Start with the simplest test, measure the results, and then decide if it’s worth further investment.

Choose Between Activation, Monetization, and Retention

Once you’ve tackled pricing experiments, the next challenge is deciding where to focus next. Should you improve your signup flow, run another pricing test, or launch a lifecycle email campaign? The answer lies in your North Star Metric and your company’s current stage.

• If most users drop off right after signing up, focus on activation.
• If users are engaged but not converting, shift to monetization.
• And if churn is stalling growth, retention needs to take center stage.

For instance, Darius Contractor, former head of growth at Dropbox, used DRICE to prioritize a migration tool for Basic users upgrading to Business accounts. His analysis showed that a simple "choose folders to share with your team" feature could significantly improve activation. What started as a small idea became the biggest activation win of the quarter. Let data and structured frameworks guide your next steps.

Document "Not Now" Decisions

As you prioritize, it’s just as important to track the ideas you decide to defer. Whenever you choose not to pursue something, document the decision and the reasoning behind it. Frameworks like MoSCoW can help you label tasks as “Won’t Have (this time)” or “Could Have” (for later). This not only keeps your backlog in check but also stops the same debates from resurfacing repeatedly.

For example, if someone asks, “Why aren’t we testing that pricing change?” you can point to a DRICE analysis showing it would take 8 weeks of engineering time for a projected $50,000 annual lift - not worth the effort right now. Review your “Not Now” list each month and clear out anything that’s no longer relevant after six months. These habits ensure your team stays focused on what truly matters, steering clear of distractions caused by constant urgency.

Conclusion

The real issue isn’t the size of your workload - it’s the lack of clear decision-making. Falling into urgency traps often means reacting to the loudest voice in the room rather than focusing on what truly matters. Research shows that only 2.5% of people can multitask effectively, and attempting to juggle tasks can actually reduce productivity by 40%. Beyond stress, the cost of constant urgency includes wasted development time, bloated roadmaps, and a drift away from your product vision.

The solution begins with recognizing these traps and staying focused on what’s important. Start by defining your priorities - align every task with your strategic goals, your North Star Metric, and the customer value you aim to deliver. Use decision-making frameworks like RICE, MoSCoW, or the Eisenhower Matrix to objectively rank tasks. As Peter Drucker wisely said, “Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things”. Build habits like daily triage and weekly reviews to make these frameworks part of your routine, so you’re not starting from scratch every day.

For SaaS teams, this shift can redefine how you approach pricing experiments, activation improvements, and retention efforts. For example, Dropbox teams that implemented detailed RICE scoring saw their key metrics improve twice as much as those using simpler prioritization methods. Summarizing deferred ideas also helps avoid repeated debates and keeps the team moving forward.

High-impact work demands focus, and focus comes from removing friction in your decision-making process. This clarity drives progress in pricing, activation, and retention - all key pillars of SaaS growth. By integrating these methods into your daily workflow, you can move from reactive to strategic work. Tools like Onsara can help combat task paralysis and decision fatigue when priorities pile up. The goal isn’t to do more - it’s to consistently focus on what truly matters, without burning out.

FAQs

How can I figure out which tasks are truly important when everything feels urgent?

When everything feels like it demands your immediate attention, it’s crucial to take a step back and prioritize effectively. One tried-and-true method for this is the Eisenhower Matrix:

• Focus on tasks that are both urgent and important - they need your immediate attention.
• Schedule time for important tasks that aren’t urgent yet - they contribute to long-term goals.
• Delegate tasks that are urgent but less important - someone else can handle these.
• Eliminate tasks that are neither urgent nor important - they’re just distractions.

This approach helps you stay on track with your bigger objectives without falling into the trap of constantly reacting to every little thing. Tools like Onsara can further enhance your productivity by organizing your tasks and minimizing distractions, allowing you to work smarter, not harder.

How can I prioritize tasks effectively when everything feels urgent?

When everything feels like a top priority, having a system to sort through the chaos can make all the difference. That's where prioritization frameworks come in - they help you zero in on what truly deserves your time and energy. Here are a few well-known methods:

• Eisenhower Matrix: This method divides tasks into four categories based on urgency and importance, helping you decide whether to tackle, delegate, or postpone them.
• Impact-Effort Matrix: A straightforward way to prioritize by focusing on tasks that offer the most value for the least amount of effort.
• Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule): Pinpoint the 20% of tasks that are likely to drive 80% of your overall results.

These approaches bring structure and clarity to your to-do list, making it easier to manage your workload without feeling overwhelmed. Tools like Onsara can further assist in keeping you organized and laser-focused on what matters most.

How can I manage decision fatigue when everything feels urgent?

When everything feels urgent and decision fatigue starts creeping in, the best strategy is to prioritize your most important tasks early in the day. This is when your energy and focus are at their highest, making it easier to tackle the big stuff. For repetitive tasks, simplify your life by building routines or automating decisions whenever possible. And for those smaller, less critical choices? Set time limits to keep yourself from spiraling into overthinking.

Hand off tasks that don’t need your direct involvement - delegation can be a game-changer. Using decision-making frameworks can also help you figure out what’s truly worth your attention. Don’t underestimate the power of regular breaks and mindfulness exercises; they can recharge your mental batteries and help you approach decisions with a fresh perspective. Tools like Onsara are also great for keeping you focused and productive, so you can stay aligned with what matters most.