Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions

"Because time, attention, and resources are finite, wise prioritization lies at the heart of any flourishing organization or meaningful life. Yet there's surprisingly little actionable advice on how to do it well—and many seductive reasons to avoid it entirely. This approachable, psychologically astute, and deeply practical book has the potential to change all that. Reading it is well worth your time."
—Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Managing Priorities is your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step.

Who Should Read This Book?

Every business person who is even remotely interested in prioritization should read Managing Priorities. Whatever you need to prioritize—tasks, goals, OKRs, projects—this book is for you. Specific chapters are dedicated to what needs to happen and when for individuals, teams, and whole organizations.

Takeaways

• Learn what prioritization is.
• Gain insight into the costs of not prioritizing intentionally.
• Explore different methods of prioritization, including the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the Max Priorities Pyramid, Paired Comparison, Stack Ranking, and more (highlighted in the Appendix).
• Apply the author's DEGAP® method of prioritization with its five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize.
• Identify, understand, and address your current state or lack of prioritization (the context of your problem, the people involved, and the issues surrounding timing).
• Use a scale to differentiate items to prioritize and arrange them appropriately.
• Select an approach to prioritization that works for your specific situation.

Harry Max is an executive player-coach, consultant, and hands-on product design and development leader with vision and a solid grasp of operations. A servant leader at heart, Harry works with senior leaders and their teams to help them realize their visions by zeroing in on pragmatic solutions to complex challenges.

Max’s experience includes having been a founder/CEO, operational leader, and strategy consultant with start-ups, innovators, and global brands, including Apple, Adobe, DreamWorks, Google, Hewlett-Packard, ITHAKA, Microsoft, PayPal, Rackspace, SGI, Symantec, and Yotascale. An early pioneer in e-commerce, Harry was a co-founder of Virtual Vineyards (wine.com), where his designs powered the interaction model behind the first usable and secure online shopping cart.

Harry Max is an autodidact. His undergraduate studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, focused on qualitative problem-solving and sociology. He is also an NLP Master Practitioner and a graduate of the Aspen Institute Technical Executive Leadership Initiative and Hoffman Institute. Max’s work has been featured internationally in the Economist, New York Times, TEDx, the Wall Street Journal, and a Harvard Business School case study. And lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mark is agenre-crossing illustrator who has illustrated over 40 books - from children's to business - including several New York Times bestsellers. He has worked with publishers including Penguin/Random House, MacMillan, Pearson, Harvard Business Review Press, Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill, and Wiley.

After creating comic strips for King Features Syndicate & Tribune Media, and for publications like the Atlantic, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, Mark Hill dipped his toes into into the sea of book illustration and humor for advertising.

He also writes and draws humor for advertising, for clients include Bayer, Cisco Systems, Coca Cola, Fidelity Investments, Google, Intel, McDonalds, Ralph Lauren and Time Warner.

Mark won the Society of Professional Journalists First place Award for Editorial Illustration in 2023, and 2024.