40. Managing Priorities (feat. Harry Max, author and managing partner at Peak Priorities LLC)
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This is the Nielsen Norman Group UX Podcast. I'm Therese Fessenden. If you ask any UX professional how they feel about their work these days, it's usually some variation on overwhelmed, overcommitted, or burnt out. And it's no secret that no matter where you work, there's often a constant battle for UX budget, time, and resources. And if you're faced with these constraints,

prioritization is the key to staying afloat staying relevant and frankly staying sane in this episode i chat with harry max author of the book managing priorities we discussed first of all what motivated him to write a whole book about prioritization secondly how prioritization itself isn't what it seems on the surface

And finally, the ways you can practice refining the many, yes, plural skills needed to prioritize in the first place. Also, at the end of the episode, we'll be sharing a discount code for 20% off on the book, Managing Priorities. So stay tuned to the very end for that special offer.

I am excited to share the nuggets of wisdom that Harry had to offer. I know I've been thinking a lot about prioritization ever since this conversation. So I hope it does the same for you and that you enjoy this interview. With that, here's Harry. Harry, thank you so much for joining us today. How are you doing? Doing great this morning. Thank you. It's nice to see you.

Yes, nice to see you too. I'm thrilled to get into our conversation today to talk a bit about prioritization. When I read your bio, it's just fascinating to see the range of different industries, companies. How did you get started in the world of UX? Funny, I started as a technical writer and my first real significant job as a technical writer

I was rewriting an installation process for a commercial Unix system at a company called Silicon Graphics. And the installation guide was about 150 pages long, and I said, "This is crazy.

It should be about maybe one page long or maybe 15 pages long. So I asked management if I could rewrite it the way it should be and if they could redesign the software to match that. And that's what they ended up doing. And that was really my, you know, I sort of realized that documentation was defect. We were explaining things that were poorly designed. And rather than explaining things, it would be really cool to start designing things properly.

And that was really the beginning. From there, I ended up ultimately joining a company called Virtual Vineyards or co-founding a company called Virtual Vineyards. It became Wine.com, where my interactions and experience with online technical documentation allowed me to do the user experience design for what turned out to be the first online shopping cart.

I think that's really amazing to hear that story. And it all kind of starts with a problem. And for whatever reason, I think UX just attracts a certain personality of people who just can't stand to see a problem and must do something about it immediately to make it more intuitive, more seamless or whatever, just to remedy this issue that is causing pain to people's experiences. With that in mind, I think your book, Managing Priorities, kind of has a, it strikes a similar chord

where you've noticed a problem and even more kind of shockingly, the lack of documentation about a particular problem, in this case, priorities. There is this one story that you share at the beginning of the book where you're kind of calmly enjoying a breakfast and suddenly you realize, wow, I'm going to have to radically change my day and put out some fires. Can you share a little bit about that story and why it was so important for you to start this book with this story?

Yeah, so I was an executive at Rackspace. I ran the user experience team there in a product organization that was almost 1,000 people big. I also had a product line, so I had two functions there. One was a horizontal function, which was the user experience function, and one was a vertical function, which was the product line for all of the user-facing interfaces, if you will. And...

So we were building, Recspace was this incredible company, it's an incredible hosting company that really led in the market by promoting fanatical support, right? They were the company that picked up the phone and solved your problem.

And we had spent a number of years building a cloud offering. At the time, we had finished our first version of the cloud. We had released it to the world, and I was taking some time off to attend a leadership conference. And the first morning before the conference even started, I got this phone call. "Hey, one of my colleagues

an amazing engineering leader named Gigi called me and said that my boss had basically been let go

And I was like, oh my God, because I had a very broad span of responsibility there. And I thought, wow, if he's gone, we have a serious, serious problem, right? Because that means that all of the plans and all of the work that we've been doing to align this large organization is probably in question right now. And there are going to be a lot of people who are panicked and a lot of people who are concerned and

Ultimately, all this can cascade out to customers and their customers. And I was like, okay. I had largely been responsible for keeping that perspective, what was important and the master complicated magical spreadsheet of priorities together with a team. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm going to have to go figure out what we're going to need to change. And it's going to be complicated. And I felt like

how often is it that you're working inside a company and somebody says, okay, well, everything you're doing, that's not right. You need to go in this other direction. Either it's because

of an acquisition or it's because of a new competitor or it's because a product perhaps hasn't succeeded in the market as you hope or the market itself changes and you don't have enough money to pursue the things that you're trying to do and this was one of those moments where like everything got thrown up in the air it was like that slow motion you know everything's up in the air and i could see it start coming down and i was like i got to get back there and see if we can figure out what to do

It is this sort of like aha moment that really crystallizes the need for a for prioritization, but B for some tangible documentation techniques around it. It's sort of this this problem that transcends industries and transcends even areas within the same industry, something you're always going to have to do. So.

On that topic, you have this funny comic about the prioritization of prioritization, which is kind of this like meta moment. Like how do you how does one prioritize prioritization if it's hard to prioritize in the first place?

After many, many years, I realized that the fundamental issue with prioritization was not just that we don't know how to do it. It's that we don't make prioritization itself a first class citizen. And part of that is because we are so now as humans, we're so naturally gifted at sea tiger run. Right. We're really good at prioritizing in simple static ways.

situations. Where things break down is that in complex, dynamic, adaptive, large organizational situations, we're terrible at prioritizing and we don't realize it because we don't know what we don't know.

We go about our lives relatively good at simple prioritization, and we don't understand that at the moment we need it the most, we're the worst at it. And that puts us into this situation where we're constantly knocked back on our heels, and we don't know what to do. Is it a planning problem? Well, yes, sort of. Is it a decision problem or a deciding problem? Yes, sort of.

But your priorities are your inputs to your plans and your decisions. Those are your options, right? So if you understand what they're supposed to be, like what's most important, what's your most important option, what's your least important option? What are the ones in the middle? If you understand all of that, you're in a significantly stronger position to then develop better plans or make more informed, more intelligent, more intentional decisions.

Yeah, and that is a skill to do. And it certainly strikes me as something that needs a lot of practice. And yes, you're certainly that it helps to have some prompts, which I know your book definitely covers some prompts around, okay, how do I start thinking through

establishing these priorities in the first place. But just kind of an interesting fact as I was reading and also just other things I've read or listened to about prioritization, like even just the term priority, I think it hasn't even been a plural word until recently. And like the Latin, the original Latin term didn't even have a plural form. It was a singular thing. You had one priority and it

that was that and it was really only like in the 40s that the term priorities started to be a bit more popular and so it kind of strikes me as it's a skill that maybe even has gotten lost over time and now people are starting to re-kindle that skill that story that you shared i think is a really relevant one to a lot of people and one that is unfortunately very

I would say, unfortunately, relevant in the sense that so many people have experienced this sort of crisis moment where there might be a radical change in priorities or whether that's new leadership that causes that or something breaks. And suddenly we realize we can't do things the way we've been doing.

Now, with that in mind, I know that was one situation that was maybe at Rackspace. You've worked at DreamWorks. You've worked at so many other organizations and with other organizations over the years. What do you think is a common factor in the organizations that do manage their priorities really well? You know, I want to say that they have a mature operating model. That is to say, how work gets done. And

operating models take many different forms, right? There are, there's like the gazelles model, the scaling up model from Vern Harnish. There's the V2MOM model from Salesforce. There are lots of different, there's the traction method. I'm forgetting what the actual, the entrepreneurial EOS, entrepreneurial operating system. There are lots of different kinds of operating models. And it's less important which one you use. It's more important that you have one.

And sometimes the operating model is maybe less mature and less methodical. That is to say, it's based on some kind of annual planning. It's really driven by annual planning. And it's not so much that any particular function or the organization itself has a well-documented, repeatable, consistent approach to, you know,

making sure that there are accountabilities, making sure that roles and responsibilities are defined and executed well, that making sure problems are documented and prioritized and escalated and dealt with and so on and so forth. But I think the fundamental answer to your question is that those organizations have an operating model and they largely follow the operating model. The companies that don't use an operating model, I think,

really struggle because so much more of what they're doing is ad hoc. And it's based on, you know, really relying very heavily on the team to be creative and effective at dealing with challenges and solving problems. But they're reinventing the wheel a lot, and there's a lot more noise in the system. And that noise tends to consume the oxygen of the organization, which is really what fuels progress.

Yeah, and I think that's really helpful to bear in mind. There are like hundreds, if not thousands of different like modifications or variations on different project management frameworks or work management frameworks.

Your book takes a notably framework agnostic approach, which I think is really great because I think that makes it really applicable to a really broad audience, no matter what framework you might be operating in, whether that's Agile or Scrum or Kanban. And I think that.

On the one hand, there's constant debate about which framework is truly the best. And like you're saying, there's so many different ones. It's like as long as you have a consistent system, when there's consistent alignment, then you're in better shape than one that's sort of like, I wonder what we're doing today. Right. Where there's kind of a clear approach forward of a clear set of, OK, these are the things that we've established and now we're moving forward.

But are there any frameworks that you might say are perhaps harmful or maybe a common misconception about the framework that maybe that's why prioritization isn't working particularly well? It's an intriguing question. And I think, you know, as I reflect on it, you know, it's far more important that teams understand

are in alignment about how they're going to prioritize than it is what sorting technique or what visual framework or what marketplace simulation or what hybrid method they're going to use. It's way more important that the team just have trust, be able to work with each other and have the space and time, the psychological safety to sort of work through these conversations and get to a place where

People can make proposals and they can sort of get to a place where they largely agree and so on and so forth. But to the to the heart of your issue is a maybe at least one distinction is confusion between like a sense making framework and a prioritization framework. Right. There's a sense making framework like Kano. Right. Or a prioritization framework like.

prune the product tree right and those are both visual frameworks and they both lay out how to think about a world but prune the product tree makes it much clearer what's more versus less important versus kano that helps you make sense of the world in a way that you can

have a prioritization discussion, but it doesn't actually imply what the priorities are. So that's the place that I think it gets tricky when people start looking at sensemaking frameworks and thinking they're prioritization frameworks, when in fact prioritization frameworks really help you understand what's more versus less important.

I think that's incredibly insightful. And what comes to mind is like you're saying there's sense making, there's this sense of like visual spatial awareness. You're like, there are a couple of frameworks, like you mentioned, the Kano method. And also there's prioritization matrices, which are showcasing like how easy or difficult it is for something to be implemented versus like the impact it may have to implement it. And like that matrix model, I think is really helpful. And I remember when,

the several times that I would facilitate sessions and I would have people do this prioritization matrix, it would often be used as like the arbiter of decision making of, hmm, this looks like the most impactful and the easiest to implement. Therefore, we are doing it. And then usually as a facilitator, I kind of have these learning moments where I say it can be the thing you decide.

But it's not the tool that's orbiting the decisions. It's simply helping you make sense of them and allowing you to have a more critical conversation about it. So it serves as a sense-making framework and is not the arbiter, but it simply serves as a tool to have more critical conversations and therefore make more informed decisions. So I think that's a really great way to describe it. And then prune the product tree, like you're saying, it leads to this

I mean, as it implies, you're pruning, you are eliminating certain things that are no longer going to serve the team or serve the product or serve the user, whatever that might be. And there's something inherently subtractive in that process, which I think is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. Like the idea that what we're not doing that or we're eliminating this or we're choosing intentionally not to do that. How do you recommend that?

folks kind of rest with that feeling. Are there two coping tips that you could recommend? Because it's certainly difficult, I think, if you're not familiar with that feeling or with that process. I want to answer that question, but I want to get back to the previous question for a minute, because I think there is so much

It's one of those matrix moments where everything slows down when you start looking at are your priorities dictating what you should be doing or are they informing what you could be doing?

Right. And this this notion of you like your judgment is the most valuable thing that you have and giving up your judgment to a visual framework or even more importantly, to a, you know, a quasi quantitative framework, some excuse me, sorting technique like simple weighted scoring. Right. This

This misguided notion that the numbers tell you what to do and that you have to follow the you have to follow what the numbers are telling you is where so many people go wrong. You must maintain your sense of agency and recognize that these really are just tools and they're really there to help you think and maintain.

make better decisions. And I think that's really at the heart of the answer to your previous question around where do things go wrong? They go wrong in that, well, this one says it's the most important, so we have to go do that. No, actually, this one says, according to the process you ran and the criteria you decided and the numbers that you picked and the estimation model that you have, that

it's more likely to be the better thing for you to choose. Now what you really want to do is go through a decision process that's healthy in the context of your group, your organization, and figure out what you're ultimately going to do. But what you've done in going through the prioritization is you've removed 100 things and now you're down to three. Talk about those three. Don't use the model or the sorting technique or even the process to force you into a decision or paint you into a corner.

So I just wanted to clear that up because I think it's really, really key. And you brought up such an important point about that moment when it does come back to what's the judgment? What is the wisdom of the team? Who's actually the decider? How does that decision get made and who ratifies that decision? Who can undo it? Who says no? Who can say no? Right. Having all that figured out puts you in a much stronger position to say, look,

this is what we think we should be doing, this is what we recommend. The decider said, we're going to go in this direction. Now we want to walk through a healthy decision process to make sure that we can move that decision into action.

Absolutely. And I think you bring up an important point because at the very beginning, you said having a good entrepreneurial operating system, right? This concept of you have a way of making decisions. You have a way of running your business, essentially. But really at the heart of it is you have a predetermined framework for making decisions as in who is making them, who is responsible, when these decisions get made. And

What comes to mind as you talk about a healthy way to do that is there's so many different cultures, like organizational cultures. Like what comes to mind is like in the Army, for example, in my time in the Army Reserve, I've seen a lot of like public sector, very hard charging like this is it. Like I've decided this is very authoritative.

uh approach and in certain contexts that makes sense especially where there's a time constraint or where there's uh you know really not very much room for negotiating and there's just a lot of action that needs to take place in a certain time frame with certain regulations certain expertise levels whatnot then there's other environments which are maybe more creative in nature where that sort of culture would not work and even though it might be beneficial to still have a ruthless prioritization

like approach, it depends is kind of the word that comes to mind or the phrase that comes to mind. And it's not that it's a cop out answer, but there really is so much variation that can determine whether or not this prioritization method or this particular approach to decision making is going to work. Whereas maybe in another organization, it works better there. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I've laid out this essentially approach agnostic approach

methodology right it i say approach agnostic because it's framework agnostic it's sorting technique agnostic it's marketplace simulation agnostic right it's agnostic of whatever approach you as an individual you as part or leader of a team or an organization might choose because that's not where the juice is the juice is in the repeatable methodology being able deciding whether you have time

and the benefit of being intentional and slowing down is going to outweigh the cost engaging in the process and really working with stakeholders to figure out like who matters and what matters gathering the information about those items the metadata the criteria the dimensions whatever it is about the items that you need or want to prioritize

arranging them in some kind of sensible order, deduplicating things, disambiguating stuff, making sure that the actual items, which is kind of in my world, an item is an unprioritized item.

thing, right? Or unprioritized potential priority, right? It's not a priority until it's prioritized. And that's actually one of the places I think a lot of people get confused. They talk about priorities like, well, we all have all these priorities. No, you have a lot of items. But until you've prioritized them, you just have a bunch of stuff.

And then actually going through the process of prioritizing once you have all that work through and that's the muscle, right? Is building through D. E. G. A. P. I didn't invent this. I just in talking to companies and teams and individuals who have robust methods for figuring out what matters most and developing the plans and making better decisions and coming up with options.

What I figured out was there really is a process and it really is repeatable and it really doesn't matter what framework or what sorting technique or marketplace simulation you use. If you follow the, you know, the bouncing ball, D E G A P every single time that muscle becomes intuitive, you know, it's, it's a, it becomes a, an unconscious competency. I think it's the framework is the, the terminology that people often use, right?

At first, it's super clunky and you have to think about it. And then you get a little better at it and you can do it while you're thinking about it, but it doesn't take as much effort. And eventually you get to a point where it's like, oh, I can just zoom through this prioritization process. And sometimes I'll pick this framework. Sometimes I'll pick that framework. Sometimes I'll slice the criteria this way or do things that way. It doesn't really matter. What matters is that you are being intentional about

the approach and you are in effect, right? Prioritizing prioritization. Got it. Yeah. So, but D-E-G-A-P, what does that stand for? Yeah. DGAP, right? It's an acronym, decide, engage, gather, arrange, and prioritize. And when people think about

prioritization generally before reading the book right because you kind of can't unring the bell of this topic once you've read the book when people think about prioritization i i tell a little bit of story about how when i got to dreamworks you know people talked about animation and i i before i went to dreamworks i kind of thought animation was one thing right and then i got to dreamworks and learned that animation is actually a lot of stuff and i you know for for people that

maybe aren't as interested in animation and the process of animation, all the technology and everything that goes into it. I liken it to skiing, right? When people talk about skiing, right? Skiing is not just lean forward, slide down the hill. You know, you have you have to, you know, well, there are you cross country skiing? Are you down? Are you downhill skiing? Are you are you prepped properly? Do you actually know what you're doing? Do you have all your equipment? Did you learn?

you know, how to be effective. Do you understand the safety rules? Do you know how to work with a ski patrol? And so like, there's all this stuff that meet that when you say skiing, you think it's just this one thing. Cause that's kind of the picture in the mind. Prioritization is the same way. It's a single picture in the mind, but if you step back from it and you look at it, like you would look at any activity that is rolled up into one word, prioritization is actually these five steps. And at the last step,

prioritizing is the one that people tend to fixate on. That's the lean forward, slide down the hill part. But the the idea is that in any prioritization effort, there's a kind of a current as is state and a desired or to be state. Right. So there's a gap between those two things.

And if you want to cross that gap in a reasonably predictable, reasonably reliable and better way than you would otherwise do if you did it just haphazardly, you want to de-gap, right? You want to close the gap. And how do you do that? You follow these steps.

I love that skiing analogy, just the idea of going downhill. Sure, that's one thing, but you can't just suddenly go from I've never skied before to now I'm going to take the black diamond and like make the most difficult decisions ever simply because I've thrown on a pair of skis.

So that I think is a really helpful way of framing. And I think it's also helpful too for folks who are newer. I think my earlier question was about coping and how do you cope if you've never really had this subtractive process and intentionally saying we are not doing that, we're saying no to this project or we're going to have to disappoint a whole bunch of people who really want to do this, but perhaps it just does not align well with what we're trying to achieve as a team or as an organization.

I think setting that expectation that these are skills and there are many different competencies that can kind of help you feel a little bit less bad about being bad at prioritizing if you are newer to it. So I just wanted to say I appreciate that mentality for sure.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if it makes sense or not, but I think about a little bit like paper cuts, right? When you don't say no, that's one paper cut. Okay, it stings a little bit, but you can die from paper cuts, right? You can have enough of them and they can be big enough that you don't make it. And I don't mean to be horribly morbid about it, but not saying no is a paper cut. And sometimes it's deeper, sometimes it's bigger,

But it's learning how to avoid the paper cuts and getting to a place where you have confidence that there are going to be some situations where you simply either can't or really don't want to say no. Learning how to say no so you can say yes to the bigger what it is you're trying to accomplish or to the better life, I think is really well covered in William Ury's book, I think it's called The Power of Positive No.

And it's about learning how to say no or not yet or perhaps later because this other thing is more important.

And so it's not just saying no to a leader. It's saying it's a how you say it and B, it's why you say it. And if you if you don't say no with, you know, with with the language and oh, and you say no is not possible right now or yes. And what it puts at risk is this other thing, right? Pulling a page out of improv, the yes and no.

sort of principle. There are so many different ways to say no in a more productive, more generative, more life affirming way and help people understand that what you're really saying no to is a bigger yes, is where that lives.

Yes, I love the call to improv as well. And that's something in our workshops, too. We're always promoting the yes and and inevitably someone says, but what if it really is no? Because there will be things that you simply can't do or won't do because it's more productive to think of other projects. And like you said, I think that approach for improv,

If, you know, yes, and if we do this, this is the risk, framing it as constructive as opposed to, you know, whether an absolute yes or an absolute no. I think that also leads us to just more informed decisions as a whole as well. One story that comes to mind with this

you know, approach to saying no to things is an interesting post I saw recently by a product thought leader named John Cutler. And he recalled a time that he met a CTO who one day out of the blue emailed his team saying, we're deleting all JIRA tickets today. Stop working. Use this time for personal education, which I know if I probably saw this, I would probably fall out of my chair thinking, what? We are doing what now?

And so JIRA, for those who aren't aware, is one of the systems that is often used for managing things like a backlog of work or projects, ongoing projects that perhaps need to be completed. So whether you use JIRA, Trello, a to-do list doesn't really matter. But the concept is we are just intentionally choosing to throw away our entire backlog and start over. And

What's really interesting about this case study, and I know he's still working with the CTO to be able to publish their name, but they went from having like this work in progress limit of a higher number to zero, which is the most extreme ever. And what's fascinating about their story is as they started reintroducing work back in, this was after a conscious decision.

intentional approach to looking through the work they had to do and thinking really deliberately about their priorities. It was after this point that they ended up improving their productivity. And I think in a matter of a couple months, they went from starting to exceed their productivity. And then in six months, it was like triple their productivity, which is remarkable. And because they were a bit more deliberate about their prioritization,

They also had better retention rates because employees were happier about the work they were doing. They didn't just feel busy. But it's also interesting, too. He goes on later to comment that this would probably be pretty sacrilege now, given this threat of layoffs. The thought of experimenting with less is kind of scary for a lot of people because, oh, am I going to be made redundant now? Is my work no longer valuable? But at the same time, just seeing this living case study happen.

seems to be serving as a testament to how prioritization not only gives people their sanity back with their work and avoids overwork, but also allows teams to just do more. It ultimately serves organizations as well as the employees. Now, I guess

Obviously, prioritization is a good thing. And it's clear you've written, you feel so strongly about it that you've written a book about it. But what are your thoughts on like drastic approaches like this? Is that something that you think is good? In this case, it seems to have worked. Or is it maybe, maybe there's better ways to go at something like this?

Well, first off, I really appreciate John and his work. And in fact, I had a conversation with him through Rosenfeld Media just a couple of weeks ago. And interestingly, the next conversation that I'm having in that series for Rosenfeld Media, which is, I think, Leadership by Design, is with Jim Meyer, who is a multi-time VP of engineering, recently left Slack and is now working independently.

And he and I are working together in an environment. And three months ago, we did exactly what John wrote about. So he John Cutler's note really hit a nerve with me because we had to I stepped into an organization as a fractional product leader to to do. I call it player coaching, right, where I'm a fractional leader. I'm also coaching and.

I stepped in in order to lead an AI pivot for a B2B SaaS product. And we figured out what we wanted to do. We got really clear about what the work was going to be. Then we started, we got all the design work done and we pushed it into engineering and we broke the engineering group. We broke the engineering group. We actually caused the engineering group to fail. And one thing that became clear to me is that

you know you've got to be careful when you're disrupt radically disrupting any system right there's a wonderful book called seeing like a state and if you haven't read that highly recommend it but one of the things is systems tend to produce the results that they were either designed or evolved to produce right and sometimes they are well-oiled machines and they are rate limited by

whatever constraints they have in those systems and if you can't see those constraints then coming in and doing something radically might cause a system to fail coming in and doing something in a more methodical more intentional more diagnostic way might be the better approach but it really depends back to that it depends and uh so i i think that's why i really like the idea of what is chapter

maybe 10 or 11 in my book where I talk about speedboat using the speedboat visual framework to get your team to understand what's impeding progress, right? Get the team to help you figure out, you know, what would what would allow it to go faster? What's impeding progress in terms of anchors? What are the risks? What are the things you would need to do in order to mitigate for those risks and actually

Don't just step into a system and make a radical decision or not make a radical decision. Work with people to figure out what is slowing it down or what could speed it up and what mitigation plans or what could you be doing that might be a better intervention than what you might do if you are not as well informed. And super interestingly and weirdly,

This is how the book got written. The book got written because I had created a diagnostic framework for problem framing, which I did a TEDx talk on when I was at Rackspace. And I gave that talk at South by Southwest. I was asked to give that to do it for TEDx. I gave it at USAA. Luke Holman invited me to do it at Adobe. And I was really fascinated, right? It's like, what is the type of problem and what's the appropriate intervention approach for that problem type?

And yet, where all the hands went up in the audience was when I touched on the topic of prioritization. Like, people didn't really care about the intervention methodology or the problem framing or the diagnostic thinking. What they cared about was how to think about prioritization and what my experiences had been there. That was what I noticed was a demand signal

And what became absurd to me was shortly thereafter realizing that I was able to find hundreds of books that talk about how important prioritization is, little bits and pieces everywhere. But I could find no book that actually wrapped it into one topic for organizations, teams, and individuals. And when I realized that, that's why I wrote the book.

That definitely strikes a chord here as well at NNG that something prioritization is the thing, is the thing that people will raise their hands about and not so much about problem setting. And what's fascinating about that, I think, is they go hand in hand in a way. It's problem setting that helps you to get at the prioritization side of things. So.

in a way, I think what you've done is very clever, right? You've taken the thing that people are like, I need the answer. And then you said, aha, I'm going to sneak in the medicine, which is now I'm going to actually tell you about some of the precursors or the things that you need to do in order for that to happen. And so I think that's really, really eye opening and very smart of you as well. Well, I appreciate your recognition of the challenge that I faced in trying to figure out how to get people to see the topic in a new way.

Absolutely. Now, I guess the last thing I have to ask you is for the folks that are newer and hoping to get their feet wet in this, is there any you mentioned practicing saying no? Are there things that these newer folks could potentially try to start doing?

In a way, I often think of prioritization as, like I said, it's a skill, but it's also a strength that you need to practice, right? You need to exercise in a way. Do you have any tips for ways that people can strengthen this muscle? Yeah, it's a great question. And interestingly, another precursor to writing this book was a conversation that I had with Christina Woodkey many, many years ago, back at South by Southwest, much earlier than the one that I talked

And she was at that point at Zynga and she said, how is it that you get so much done? She said, I can't I'm overwhelmed with all of the stuff we've got going on here. I guess she was a GM at Zynga.com. And I said, well, here's the approach that I use, and it's called the morning boot routine. And it's really a very simple pattern for folks who want to prioritize better for themselves by themselves. And it starts with understanding what it is you're avoiding.

And then prioritize, you know, if you've got if you're avoiding multiple things, which one are you really avoiding? And then just go spend a few minutes on that. Right. Are you avoiding a tough conversation? Are you avoiding some administrivia? Are you avoiding taking care of some business? What is it you're avoiding? And then just for that day.

just go spend a few minutes, 15, 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes dealing with that thing you're avoiding. And that's the first piece of the morning boot routine, which is laid out in gory detail in, I think, chapter nine. And it's building the muscle not only to identify something like the things you're avoiding, but also then to build the muscle

to then get more comfortable dealing with that thing and it becomes this virtuous cycle because identifying it like being honest with yourself i'm really avoiding this and then going and dealing with that the magic of is it the magic of it is it releases all this positive energy and so it's like oh that felt good i can't tell you how many clients and how many friends have told me

I don't know why I was avoiding that because it felt so good to figure out that I was avoiding it and then go deal with it. Right. And building the muscle starting there really opens the door and lets the fresh air in on the topic. And what comes to mind is I know there's different approaches for like tackling a to-do list. For example, some people try the avalanche method, which is I'm going to try something small and then it's going to snowball into maybe some bigger and bigger projects as the day progresses, kind of,

capitalizing on the dopamine that gradually increases. But yours is kind of the opposite, which is another philosophy as well. It's right tackling the hardest thing or maybe something you really don't want to do and then using that as a way to build confidence. And I mean, both of them are solid methods, but I think especially to the point you mentioned earlier, which is the idea of saying no and like the idea of practicing that discomfort, that's really ultimately going to get at the heart of that outcome, I think.

Harry, it's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you today and gives me a lot of food for thought as well, just in the ways that I can start practicing prioritization in my life. And not only that, all the steps before that help to make a better prioritization outcome. Do you have any places that you could refer people to if they want to follow your work? Yeah, there are probably two places. Number one, LinkedIn, for better or for worse. That's where I spend most of my social media capital.

And I also have a I am running the prioritization practice under a business called Peak Priorities, P-E-A-K, Peak Priorities, LLC. So peakpriorities.com. And it's a new website, so there's not much there, but I am going to be putting more and more material there. And ultimately, we'll be opening up some kind of repository for the boxes of books that I have, boxes of material, rather, that I have that didn't make it into the book.

Amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much, Harry, for your time. It's been an absolute pleasure and I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much. It was great to be here. That was Harry Max, author of the book, Managing Priorities. You can find that book on Amazon and on Rosenfeldmedia.com. That link is in the episode notes.

If you do purchase through Rosenfeld Media, you can get the book for 20% off using the code PRIORITIES. That's P-R-I-O-R-I-T-I-E-S. Again, that's PRIORITIES or 20% off at RosenfeldMedia.com.

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