How to Prioritize When Everything Feels “Important”
(Especially when you’re a one-person marketing team)
If you’ve worked at a startup or honestly, any company without clear processes, you know this feeling too well:
Everything is “important.” Everything is “urgent.” And everything is somehow your job.
Where’s the social post?
Where are the pre-orders?
Why isn’t the blog up?
Why is this tiny website issue still not fixed?
Why aren’t you tracking 29 different GA4 metrics at once?
And the list will always grow.
It’s not that you don’t have answers.
It’s not that you don’t want to deliver.
It’s that you’re one person, or part of a tiny team of 1–5 trying to perform like a 20-member marketing department.
But here’s the harsh truth most companies ignore:
If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.
And if you don’t decide what actually matters, someone else will, and they’ll pile even more on your plate.
So here’s the one thing you need to remember when chaos hits:
Start with what matters to the business.
Not what’s loudest.
Not what someone randomly pinged you about.
Not what feels nice to finish.
Not what’s easy to tick off.
But what actually moves the business forward.
That’s your North Star.
If a task doesn’t push your North Star, it’s not important today.
Yes, that includes the social post.
Yes, that includes the blog someone suddenly remembered after three months.
Yes, even that website pixel that “has to be fixed ASAP.”
When the goal is sales, and you’re driving sales. A lot of the noise simply does not matter.
Your responsibility is not to complete every task thrown at you.
Your responsibility is to move the business closer to the goal.
The second filter: effort vs. outcome.
You don’t have unlimited time or unlimited energy and startups love to pretend you do, but reality hits different.
So when everything feels equally urgent, ask:
If something requires high effort but doesn’t drive meaningful outcome → it’s noise.
If something requires low effort and drives a solid outcome → do it early.
If something requires high effort and drives high outcome → protect time for it.
This alone will save your sanity.
Okay, But What If Everything Still Feels Important?
If everything still feels important even after filtering by the business goal and effort vs outcome, then it is not a prioritization problem. It is a clarity problem.
Things feel equally urgent when:
This is when you take a step back and ask one question:
What are we trying to achieve right now?
Not the five things. Not the wishlist. The one thing.
Once that is clear, every task either pushes the business toward it or it does not.
If it does not, it is not important. If it does, it moves up your list.
Chaos becomes manageable the moment you stop reacting and start aligning.
Too much to track in your head? Same.
So I built a clean Excel sheet that does the prioritizing for you.
Add your tasks, mark the dropdowns, sort, done.
Grab the template: