Sort tasks into a priority matrix.
The Eisenhower matrix sorts tasks by importance and urgency, and its central insight is that importance should dominate — urgent-but-unimportant work is what fills days without advancing anything. This weights importance most heavily, urgency next, and adds a deadline pressure term that rises sharply as the date approaches. The value-per-hour figure breaks ties between tasks landing in the same quadrant.
Weighted priority score
Deadline pressure = min(10, 10 / days to deadline); score = importance x 5 + urgency x 3 + pressure x 2; value per hour = importance x 10 / effort hours
Because urgency is often manufactured by other people's planning failures. Work that is urgent and unimportant feels productive and produces nothing, which is the specific trap the matrix exists to expose.
Give it a calendar slot immediately. Important non-urgent work — planning, learning, relationship building, prevention — is what gets permanently displaced by urgency, and only a booked slot protects it.
It separates two tasks with identical importance and urgency by their cost. A high-importance task needing one hour should precede an equally important one needing twenty, since it banks the value sooner.