An easy way to identify importance: how much do you value that commitment?

The Eisenhower Matrix, popularised by Stephen Covey, is no doubt the most common approach to prioritisation. Separate the urgent from the important - which gives you four quadrants. Read it again if you're still doing non-urgent, non-important tasks.

But there's little guidance on how to rank importance.

After all, when does a task become unimportant? Hang on, something's missing here - if it's not important, why are we doing it at all? That means every task on the list must be important in some way.

Just perhaps not to you.

But if not you, then to someone you value. Your life-partner, kids, family, friends, client, boss, co-worker, stakeholder, even your neighbour - all of them collectively your customers. Which means we can determine importance based on how much you value that customer.

Bet you never thought there was a use for your values.

Most methods to identify values don't separate the 'who' from the 'what' or the 'how'. Between that and limiting your choices to five makes most approaches to values a bit pointless. Try a different way.

List your main customers - anybody who gives you any form of compensation - and rank them.

Then apply that value list to your tasks. Rank your tasks by customer, then by how important that specific commitment is to that customer. Do that a few times then create a system to do it for you.

Values determine importance.