The Priority Cut
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- —
Sparks' prioritisation exercise, run with coaching clients and described as painful enough that nobody enjoys it. You list every priority across health, career and relationships, rank them, then delete the bottom half. What remains is filtered again to a single top priority, which by definition is non-negotiable and gets the first block of the day while everything else fits around it. The audit that makes it real is the calendar: he compares what clients say matters against where their hours actually go, and asks whether something is not a priority or whether they are simply not prioritising it. A weekly check-in turns misses into a canary — two consecutive misses is a red, which triggers either an honest demotion of the goal or a small experiment to make it happen.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Brainstorm every priority you are carrying
List everything across each life area — health, career, relationships, side projects. Sparks' clients typically produce ten, twelve, sometimes twenty-six items.
- 2
Rank them in strict order
Number the list one through N. People happily do this because they assume the ranking is just an order of operations for doing all of them.
- 3
Cross out the bottom half
Put a line through everything below the midpoint. Ten goals for the quarter becomes five. From then on, any update about a deleted goal gets cut off with 'what progress do you have on one through five'.
Watch out The biggest distractions are the things you can justify afterwards but that were never your top priorities. That is the opportunity cost.
- 4
Name the single top priority and make it non-negotiable
Accept that there is only one. It goes first — its own block in the morning — and everything else fits around it, like the boulder placed in the jar before the sand. Important-but-not-urgent work must be placed first because urgent things will always find their own time.
Pro tip Ask what the top priority concretely looks like. 'Family is my top value' has to become dinner every night, or an hour of undivided attention before bed.
- 5
Ask what you have to stop doing
If it is really a priority, something must give. Sparks challenges the 'same but more, plus twenty percent' style of goal-setting by asking where the extra twenty percent is going to come from and what is being dropped to make room.
- 6
Audit the calendar against the stated priorities
Put the goals and the calendar side by side. If the biggest goal of the quarter appears nowhere in the schedule, the question is whether it is not a priority or whether it is simply not being prioritised. Behaviour is the best proxy for values.
Watch out Be prepared to walk back your own justifications. Clients often find they cannot honestly claim the things they actually did were more important.
- 7
Run a weekly check-in with a canary
Ask each week whether the priority action happened. One miss is yellow, two in a row is red — a signal that what you are doing is not working. First re-confirm the goal still matters, then commit to one experiment for the coming week that might make it happen.
Pro tip Zero judgement. You are allowed to decide the goal no longer matters — what you are not allowed to do is leave it undecided.
In the wild
Ali's editor asked how the book was going, heard that stuff had come up, and told him kindly that if the book is his number one priority it does not look like he is prioritising it — and if it isn't, that's a different conversation. Then she asked what they could try as an experiment that week. He committed to a non-negotiable three-hour morning block, working from a local restaurant because he doesn't get work done at home, clocking in on the book Slack channel, and posting screenshots for accountability.
→ More progress on the book in seven days than in the whole preceding month.
A client tells Sparks family is his top value. The follow-up is what that concretely looks like — sitting down for dinner every night, an hour of undivided attention before the kids' bedtime, weekends completely off work. There is no right answer, but once it is defined the next question is what has to get out of the way for it to be true, and what currently prevents dinner from happening.
→ A stated value converted into a specific recurring commitment with named obstacles.
Common mistakes
Keeping several 'top' priorities
Sparks says it is so obvious it barely needs stating, yet we act as though it isn't true: there can only be one top priority, and if it is genuinely top it is non-negotiable and everything else arranges itself around it.
Setting goals as same but more, plus twenty percent
Status quo bias produces quarterly goals that are last quarter's list with twenty percent added — more articles, more weight on the bench. Nobody asks where the additional capacity comes from or what is being removed.
Scheduling important-not-urgent work last
Treating the priority as something you do when convenient, when you are not busy and have no deadlines, means the urgent always wins. You cannot fill the jar with sand and then insert the boulder.
From the transcript
“i want you to go through the bottom half of your list and cross a line through them”
“so like which one is it is it not a priority for you or is it you're just not prioritizing it”
“there can only be one top priority we like to act as like there's a bunch of top priorities but like there's only one top…”
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