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What’s Disorganized or Disrespectful?
Buffett’s approach to prioritization starts in a standard manner: he recommends making a Top 25 list of the things we want to accomplish. And then he suggests we organize our time around the top 5., no surprises at all.
The nuance comes in that he mandates we avoid spending ANY time on priorities 6 to 25.
These are seductive distractions, and we need to “strategically underachieve” in all of them.
Blah blah
Every hour we spend on a lower priority is time he argues we could - and should - spend on one of our top priorities. They’re literal distractions, distracting us from what matters more.
When to use 5/25?
We’ve seen 5/25 work in several areas:
- PRODUCT PRIORITIES: here’s a great 3-minute video from Steve Jobs in 1997 right after he returned as CEO talking about how Apple’s “sum was less than the sum of its parts” and about “how focusing is about saying ‘no’.”
- Staying with Steve Jobs, he’s also part of a favourite anecdote from Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s CEO from 2009-20, and on both of our Mount Rushmores for legendary operators. Helping inform Jeff’s own framework - Jeff Weiner’s Prioritization Bullseye - Jeff shared in this NY Times interview that Jobs joined a Yahoo! offsite in 2007 where Jobs taught him:
“True prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can’t rationalize the answer, and you can’t attach the one thing to some other things. It’s just the one thing. And I was struck by the clarity and the courage of his conviction. He felt it so deeply, and there wasn’t a person in the audience that day who did not take that with them as a lasting memory.”
- BTW since we’re business geeks and since John was at Yahoo! from 2006-2010, we couldn’t resist linking to “The Peanut Butter Manifesto” by Brad Garlinghouse, published in 2006: it sounds like the opposite of 5/25…
- CHANGE MANAGEMENT: we’ve both seen leaders come into big new roles - often from outside the company - and suddenly decide that a dozen things need to change ASAP. This is a recipe for failure since “more is less” when it comes to change management and trying to pull your priorities and message through. WRITE 1-2 SENTENCES HERE. We both love longtime LinkedIn leaders Mike Derezin’s 5 Steps of Leading Through Change.
- PERSONAL PURSUITS: 5/25 can be especially helpful with New Year’s Resolutions and Annual Goals. We’ve both been guilty of peanut-buttering our focus across 15+ priorities on January 1: we’re going to read, write, exercise, and meditate more, eat plant-based diets and learn new languages and technologies, while also becoming better dads, spouses, siblings, friends, mentors and leaders. Then March 1 arrives, we acknowledge we’re making limited progress on most of our supposed priorities, and we give up the list entirely. Sigh. In 2024, both of us are employing 5/25 (see next!).
How do J&J use 5/25?
Mention how punctual Microsoft is
MEETINGS DON’T RUN OVER - FRED KOFMAN ETC.
Want to learn more?
If you like a British cockney accent - think Michael Caine - and want to spend 6 minutes digging in with some sort-of-cool, sort-of-cringe graphics, this video is for you…
James Clear is a fan of 5/25 too [he’s the author of Atomic Habits, a book James in particular loves (read his What’s the So What write-up here)]
Hmm, perhaps Uncle Warren didn’t author 5/25? No matter, we still love it…
Finally, be sure to check out our favourite prioritization Blueprints below:
Personal Performance Blueprints
@John Mayhall any thoughts on how we want to end each Blueprint? Maybe something like below - where I’ve assumed most folks are on mobile (it doesn’t work as well on desktop):