The 20-10-3 Priority Cut
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Bloom uses a Warren Buffett-attributed prioritisation exercise to protect bandwidth for high-upside opportunities. You write down twenty things that matter to you, cross off ten, then cross off seven more, leaving three that truly matter. Anything that arrives which is not on that list of three is an automatic no. The mechanism is not tidiness, it is optionality: saying yes to random singles fills your calendar and headspace, so when a genuinely juicy opportunity appears you either cannot take it or cannot even think clearly about it. He pairs this with a related discipline, the ability to feel FOMO about a new platform or trend and deliberately not act on it, which he considers a superpower of the highest performers.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Write twenty priorities
List twenty things that are genuinely important to you right now: projects, channels, relationships, business lines. Do it fast and without editing so the real set surfaces.
- 2
Cross off ten
Cut the list in half. You are now left with ten things that really matter, which is still far more than anyone can pursue with real energy.
- 3
Cross off seven more
Reduce to the three that truly matter. This is the painful cut, because the seven you removed are all plausible and defensible.
Pro tip The seven you just cut are the dangerous ones. They are attractive enough to sneak back in as 'quick wins'.
Watch out Bloom concedes it sounds crazy and draconian. That reaction is the point, not a reason to soften it.
- 4
Say no to everything off the list
Anything that comes up which is not one of the three gets a default no. This gives you a fast decision rule instead of an agonised case-by-case evaluation.
- 5
Price the yes in bandwidth, not hours
Before accepting anything, ask what it costs in headspace rather than calendar time. The real cost of a yes is being too swamped to notice or act on the high upside thing later.
- 6
Feel the FOMO and do nothing
When a new platform or trend appears, expect the pull. Bloom's test is whether you can experience the fear of missing out without taking action against it, staying a king of one thing rather than a jack of all trades.
Pro tip Bruce Lee's framing: fear the man who has practised one kick ten thousand times, not the man with ten thousand kicks.
In the wild
Ali Abdaal spent two hours with a marketing agency going through his business, discussing sales teams, A/B testing pages and course funnels. The agency stopped him and asked what his biggest organic channel was. YouTube, by an enormous margin. Then they asked how much effort he was putting into YouTube relative to everything else. Not very much. Their recommendation was to drop the peripheral optimisations and double down on the single dominant channel. It is the 20-10-3 cut applied to a business: the long list of things you probably should be doing is precisely what stops you doing the one thing that works.
→ Refocused effort on the single highest-leverage channel instead of spreading across TikTok, Reels, LinkedIn and threads.
Ali angel invested in around a dozen companies without treating it as one of his core three. The founders message him asking for things, he takes months to reply to WhatsApp, and he then feels bad about not offering real value. He describes semi-regretting the whole thing after reading Tim Ferriss's post on why he stopped angel investing. The commitments were individually small but collectively occupied headspace with no corresponding energy behind them, which is exactly the failure the priority cut is designed to prevent.
→ A dozen low-energy commitments generating guilt and message debt instead of returns or enjoyment.
Common mistakes
Keeping the ten instead of cutting to three
Ten priorities feels responsible and is functionally identical to no priorities. The whole mechanism depends on the second cut, which is the one people skip because every remaining item looks justified.
Saying yes to random one-off singles
Each individual yes seems cheap. The cumulative effect is that when the high upside opportunity arrives you are too swamped to take it, or too mentally strapped to even evaluate it.
Treating a new platform as a safety net
Ali describes scattergunning across TikTok, Reels and LinkedIn out of a scarcity fear that everyone will leave YouTube. The diversification feels protective but is counterproductive, because it weakens the one asset that actually works.
From the transcript
“write down 20 things that are important to you like the 20 priorities for your life cross 10 of them off the list you're left…”
“now you're missing the high upside stuff because you took on the you know random one-off singles”
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