How startup founders can prioritise when it all feels urgent

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You know that feeling when everything is on fire, and you’re the only one holding a bucket? Welcome to being a startup founder.

At first, it seems logical to sprint in all directions, because if you don’t, who will? You need funding. You need users. You need a product. You need marketing. And, oh yeah, you need sleep.

But so many startups fail – not because there’s no time to get things done – because their founders spend their time on the wrong things. Prioritisation is working on what actually matters, rather than just working harder. The best founders pick a lane and sprint.

The challenge here is that everything feels urgent. So how do you figure out what truly deserves your attention? Let’s talk about that.

Why prioritisation matters

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine two founders, Alice and Bobbi.

Alice starts each day tackling whatever feels most pressing. Her inbox is overflowing, her social media pings non-stop, and she’s always jumping from one task to the next. She’s working hard, no doubt about that, but her business feels like a hamster wheel. Lots of motion, not much forward progress.

Bobbi, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Each morning, before checking her email or answering Slack messages, she spends an hour on the most critical task for her startup. She’s not doing more than Alice. In fact, she might be doing less. But she’s always moving the ball forward in the right direction.

Now, who do you think is more likely to succeed? It’s Bobbi every time.

Startups are a bit like building a house. You can buy the best furniture in the world, but if the foundation isn’t solid, the whole thing is going to collapse.

And yet, so many founders spend time picking out the equivalent of fancy curtains before they’ve even built walls.

Let’s look at three strategies that can help.

Strategy 1: Start with the Eisenhower Matrix

Ever feel like you’re constantly putting out fires? That’s because you probably are. But not all fires are worth your attention.

Back in the 1950s, American president Dwight Eisenhower looked at the endless flood of tasks coming his way and thought, “I need a better system.” So he took them all and divided his tasks into four quadrants:


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Here’s how you can apply it to your startup:

  • 1. Urgent and Important (top-left): A major bug is crashing your app. Your biggest customer is about to cancel. A key investor wants to meet tomorrow. These are fires you need to put out immediately.
  • 2. Not Urgent but Important (top-right): Talking to customers. Building scalable systems. Developing a long-term strategy. These are the things that actually drive success, but they rarely scream for attention, so founders neglect them.
  • 3. Urgent but Not Important (bottom-left): Endless emails. Scheduling meetings. Formatting a pitch deck. These feel pressing, but they don’t create real progress. Delegate them if you can.
  • 4. Not Urgent or Important (bottom-right): Tweaking the website font for the fifth time. Attending every startup event in town. These are distractions. Cut them.

The trick is making time for what’s in the “Important but Not Urgent” box. That’s where real growth happens. Here's how you can use the Eisenhower Matrix today.

    1. Take your to-do list and sort everything into the four quadrants.
    1. Spend most of your time in Quadrant 2.
    1. Delegate or cut anything in Quadrants 3 and 4.

The next time you sit down to work, ask if you’re doing something important, or if you’re just reacting to what feels urgent? If you master this distinction, you’ll move faster and smarter than most founders ever will.

Strategy 2: Break it down with the 80/20 Rule

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, noticed something strange about his pea plants. Only 20% of them produced 80% of the peas.

This is what’s known as the 80/20 Rule, where 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. Turns out, this rule applies to almost everything – including startups.

  • 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of your customers.
  • 80% of your growth will come from 20% of your marketing efforts.
  • 80% of your product’s value comes from 20% of its features.

Startups don’t have unlimited time, money, or energy. So you need to focus on the few things that make the biggest difference.

Yet, most founders spend too much time on the wrong 80%. They waste hours on social media when only a few channels actually drive customers. They build features no one needs instead of improving the ones that do.

So how do you find the right 20%? Ask the question:

Which 20% of tasks will create 80% of the impact for my startup right now?

For early-stage startups, for example, that usually means:

  • Revenue-generating activities – If a task doesn’t help you get customers or make money, question whether it’s worth doing.
  • Validating key assumptions – A startup is a series of experiments. Test your riskiest assumptions first.
  • Bottleneck removal – What’s the one thing blocking progress? Solve that before doing anything else.

Airbnb did this brilliantly. In their early days, they had a problem, nobody was booking listings. Instead of adding features, they focused on one high-leverage task: flying to New York and helping hosts take better photos.

Better photos meant more trust, which meant more bookings. That single change transformed their business. Here's a plan for applying the 80/20 rule to your startup.

    1. List everything you’re currently working on.
    1. Circle the top 20% that will have the highest impact on growth.
    1. Eliminate, automate, or postpone the rest.

This helps you do the right things and block out everything else.

Strategy 3: Go deeper with the ‘One Thing’ method

Even when you narrow down, you can still end up with too many things on your plate. To solve this, entrepreneur Gary Keller, the author of The One Thing, recommends you ask a deceptively simple question:

"What’s the ONE thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else becomes easier or unnecessary?"

It’s like knocking over the first domino in a chain. Get that first piece right, and everything else falls into place.

Most founders, though, treat everything like it’s equally urgent. They check email, edit their website, update their pitch deck – doing a little bit of everything and a whole lot of nothing.

So this is the strategy to apply the method to your startup.

  1. Identify the most important problem you need to solve right now.
  2. Focus entirely on solving that problem before moving to the next one.
  3. Block out distractions and work on this first every day.

For example:

  • If you don’t have customers, your One Thing is getting them.
  • If you’re struggling with retention, your One Thing is improving your product.
  • If you need funding, your One Thing is proving traction.

The trick is to make sure you’re always working on the most important domino. The best founders do the right thing at the right time – and that helps them do it better than anyone else.

How to make prioritisation a habit

Most founders know prioritisation matters.

But when you're in the thick of running a startup – juggling investor meetings, product tweaks, and customer issues – it's easy to slip into reactive mode.

That’s why to be a good founder, you can’t rely on willpower or gut instinct to decide what to work on. You need to make prioritisation a daily habit with repeatable systems focused on what moves the needle.

Here’s how you can turn prioritisation into a habit.

1. What should I work on

Start every morning with a simple question: If I completed just one thing today, what would make the biggest impact?

That’s the task you should prioritise. Most startup tasks fall into two categories:

  • High-leverage work that pushes the business forward e.g. customer research, shipping a product feature that solves a major pain point, testing a pricing model).
  • Busywork that feels productive but doesn’t move the needle e.g. tweaking your logo, answering non-urgent emails, attending events with no clear value.

The goal is to focus on the first and cut as much of the second as possible. Knowing your biggest priority will help you do that.

2. How should I work on it?

Prioritisation isn’t just about knowing what to do, it’s making sure you actually do it. This is where structure matters.

Most startup days are eaten up by meetings, emails, and Slack messages. If you wait for a “free moment” to focus, it’ll never come. That’s why time blocking is essential.

To do this, block out time in your calendar for deep work. Schedule every major task like it’s a meeting with an investor. Then, kill the distractions. Close Slack, pause notifications, and set “Do Not Disturb” on your phone.

One of the best ways to start doing this is, each morning, set aside three hours of uninterrupted time for your most important task. The best founders treat these hours as sacred—because their startup depends on them.

3. How do I know I’ve done it?

At the end of each week, take 30 minutes to reflect:

  • Did I actually work on high-impact tasks, or was I just busy?
  • What key learning did I gain this week?
  • What’s the biggest constraint I need to remove next?

Startups move fast. A month of bad prioritisation can stall momentum, or kill it completely. But if you catch mistakes within a week, you can course-correct before you waste too much time

4. How do I stay focused?

The hardest part of prioritisation isn’t choosing what to do, it’s choosing what not to do.

Distractions creep in disguised as “opportunities.” A promising partnership, a new marketing channel, an idea for a feature that “just needs a little tweaking.”

To stay focused, create a ‘No List’ – tasks you’re explicitly not doing right now.

  • Minor UI tweaks before product-market fit.
  • Networking just for the sake of it.
  • Fundraising before proving traction.
  • Scaling a product that hasn’t been validated.

Every time a new idea or opportunity pops up, ask: Does this fit our priorities right now? If not, put it on the No List and move on.

Final thoughts

Let’s go back to Alice and Bobbi.

Alice is still bouncing between tasks, responding to emails, and feeling overwhelmed. But Bobbi is focused. She’s making sure each step leads logically to the next. The difference isn’t intelligence. It's the focus.

Prioritisation is cutting the fluff and doubling down on what actually moves the needle. The best founders don’t trust themselves to “just remember” what’s important.

They build systems that ensure they stay focused even when things get chaotic. So, the next time you sit down to work, ask yourself the questions: Am I doing something truly important? Or am I just reacting to whatever feels urgent?

Master that distinction, and you won’t just survive the startup game. You’ll win it.