Ep 141: The Priority Paralysis
How to Overcome Priority Paralysis and Actually Get Things Done in 2026
It's a brand new year. You have 47 things on your to-do list, 12 of them marked urgent, goals demanding your attention, and you're completely paralyzed—staring at your screen, unable to start anything. If this sounds familiar, you're experiencing what I call "priority paralysis," and today we're going to fix it.
The Real Problem Isn't Time Management—It's Clarity Management
Most creative professionals and agency owners think they have a time management problem. But after working with hundreds of creative businesses, I've discovered the truth: it's actually a clarity problem. When everything feels urgent and nothing feels clear, you end up spinning your wheels on busy work instead of moving your business forward.
Sally Mann, the world-renowned photographer, puts it perfectly in her memoir Artwork: "The measure of artistic success is not money, it's time. And you must relegate it like the metronomic steps of the most unflappable beefeater on parade... knowing what I have to do every hour of every day and every week of every month is what allows me to schedule, yes schedule, creativity."
This is what we're diving into today—how to schedule your creativity by mastering priority management.
The Three Types of Confusion Causing Your Priority Paralysis
Before we get into solutions, let's identify the exact confusion points that are causing your paralysis:
1. Strategic vs. Tactical Blur
Is this task going to move your business forward, or is it just keeping the plates spinning? When you can't distinguish between strategic work and tactical busy work, everything feels equally important—which means nothing gets the attention it deserves.
2. Mine vs. Theirs Confusion
Should you be doing this task, or should someone else? This confusion leads to creative business owners doing work that should be delegated, automated, or eliminated entirely. It's the fastest path to burnout and the slowest path to growth.
3. Now vs. Later Time Confusion
Is this actually urgent, or is it just the loudest thing right now? We've all been in meetings where the loudest person dominates the conversation, and suddenly their priorities become everyone's priorities—regardless of actual importance.
Here's a sobering statistic: 58% of agency owners cite revenue as their top concern, yet most are working on urgent items, not important ones. They're spinning wheels, not moving forward.
The Focus Funnel: Your Priority Framework for 2026
At Chief Creative Consultants, we've developed what we call the Priority Framework—a combination of the Focus Funnel and the Eisenhower Matrix. Today, I'm going to walk you through the Focus Funnel portion, which will immediately help you cut through your priority paralysis.
Here's how it works: Take every task on your plate right now and run it through this funnel by asking these four questions in order:
Question 1: Can This Be Eliminated?
Does this task actually need to happen, or is it just busy work? Coming off the holiday break is the perfect time to ask this question. What projects or tasks survived the break that you can now eliminate entirely?
Question 2: Can This Be Automated?
If you can't eliminate it, can technology handle it? With AI, automation software, and countless process tools available, many tasks that used to require human intervention can now be automated completely.
Question 3: Can This Be Delegated?
If you can't eliminate or automate it, does it actually need to be you doing this work? Is this really what you should be spending your time on, or should someone else be handling it?
Question 4: Is This Now or Later?
If it passes all three previous filters and it genuinely must be you doing this work, the final question is: does it need to be right now? The liberation of "not now" doesn't mean "never"—it just means you can schedule it strategically for later.
Here's the critical insight: When you properly run tasks through the Focus Funnel, only about 20% of what you started with should actually land on your plate to do right now. If you started with 10 items, you should end up with about 2 that truly require your immediate attention.
Understanding Your Capacity: The Missing Piece
Priority paralysis happens because we say yes without checking our actual capacity. We keep adding tasks to an already overflowing plate without removing anything.
Here's the dangerous question most creatives ask: "Can I fit this in?"
Here's the right question: "Does this replace something else? And if so, is that something else actually more important?"
I'm developing a comprehensive Capacity Planning Framework that's coming out later this quarter, but here's the preview: whatever your capacity is, you need to subtract 20% margin. If standard capacity is 40 hours per week, plan for 32 hours of actual work. That 20% buffer isn't optional—it's essential for sustainable creativity.
To truly understand your capacity, you need real data, not feelings. Start tracking: How long does it take you to strategize for a campaign? Write copy? Edit in post-production? Pack up and tear down gear for shoots? Concept different logo designs? Stop guessing and start measuring.
⚡️ 3 Key Takeaways
- Priority paralysis is a clarity problem, not a time problem. When you can't distinguish between strategic and tactical, mine and theirs, or now and later, everything feels equally urgent and you end up frozen.
- The Focus Funnel will cut your actual priorities by 80%. By systematically asking whether tasks can be eliminated, automated, delegated, or deferred, you'll discover that only 20% of your "urgent" items actually require your immediate attention.
- Capacity planning requires a 20% margin. You can't prioritize effectively without knowing your actual capacity, and that capacity must include a buffer for the unexpected—whether you think you need it or not.
💬 3 Notable Quotes
"The measure of artistic success is not money, it's time. Knowing what I have to do every hour of every day and every week of every month is what allows me to schedule, yes schedule, creativity." - Sally Mann
"Priority paralysis happens because we say yes without checking our capacity. The right question isn't 'Can I fit this in?' The right question is 'Does this replace something else, and if so, is that something else actually more important?'"
"When you properly run tasks through the Focus Funnel, only about 20% of what you started with should actually land on your plate to do right now. Be ruthless."
Your Action Plan: What to Do Right Now
Today: Item Purge (Brain Dump)
Open your task list right now. Write down everything that's demanding your attention. Run every single item through the Focus Funnel: Eliminate, Automate, Delegate, or Defer. Be ruthless. Remember: only 20% should survive to your actual to-do list.
This Week: Priority Session
Block 10-30 minutes for a weekly priority session. I do mine Sunday nights to hit the ground running Monday morning, but you can do Monday mornings if you're an early riser. Identify your top three strategic priorities for the week. Everything else either supports those big three or waits.
This Month: The Big Three Rule
No more than three major priorities active at once. If those three take all month, they stay there. If one takes a month, one takes two weeks, and one takes a week, things move in and out—but you never add without removing. That's where priority paralysis happens.
Ongoing: Capacity Check
Start tracking your hours available versus hours committed. Use real-time data, not feelings. Build in that 20% buffer for the unexpected. This is how you schedule creativity without living completely depleted and maxed out.
Next Level: Decision Delegation Framework
Identify recurring decisions like client requests and project scope questions. Create decision criteria for your team so they can filter these items themselves. This empowers them to handle tactical decisions while you focus on strategic priorities.
Featured Resources
Ready to break free from priority paralysis? Download the Priority Framework for free at dustinpead.com/free. This comprehensive tool combines the Focus Funnel with the Eisenhower Matrix to help you identify what truly matters.
You can also download the DO vs DUE Framework to help you work backwards and plan out your real deadlines.
Learn more about how Chief Creative Consultants can help you and your creative team move from chaos to clarity at dustinpead.com.
Follow me on social media @dustinpead for daily insights on creative productivity and systems.
Special Book Giveaway
I'm giving away a free copy of Sally Mann's Artwork to one lucky reader! To enter:
- Head to the Creativity Made Easy YouTube channel
- Find this episode (Episode 141: The Priority Paralysis)
- Comment with one takeaway you're implementing from this episode
- Entry deadline: January 16, 2026 at noon EST
I'll randomly select one winner and mail you your own copy of this incredible memoir on the creative life.
What's Next?
Next week, we're tackling why your team might hate your new system—or any new system you're about to roll out. We'll dive into change management for creative teams, because implementing systems is one thing, but getting people to actually use them? That's the real work.
Until then, remember: you can't do everything, but you can do the right things. Schedule your creativity. Protect your capacity. And be ruthlessly intentional about what gets your attention.
Let's make 2026 your best year yet.
SUMMARY
Everyone's talking about what to add to their plate in January—new goals, new systems, new habits. But what if the secret to your best creative year isn't about adding more, but ruthlessly removing what's been draining your energy all year long?
Most creative teams start the year buried under last year's unfinished business while trying to add new goals to the pile. The typical pattern goes like this: survive December's holiday chaos, then magically expect January 1st to be a fresh start with new systems and goals. By January 15th, nothing has actually changed because the old mess is still there. And by February, it's back to chaos—but now with guilt about abandoning your goals so soon.
Here's why this doesn't work for creative teams: you can't build new systems on top of broken foundations and expect good results. Your team is already carrying the cognitive load from incomplete projects of 2025, every "someday" task from water cooler conversations, and all the digital clutter that's accumulated. This builds decision fatigue, so even with ambitious goals posted on the wall, you're exhausted by mid-January because you didn't shed the weight of 2025 first.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Addition without subtraction is just accumulation. You can't build new systems on top of broken foundations. Subtract first in December, then add in January when you have the capacity for it.
⚡️ Your calendar should serve your priorities, not control them. Every recurring meeting should justify its existence against your current reality, not historical circumstances.
⚡️ It's okay to give yourself permission not to move on good ideas. If it's not the right time or you don't have the right resources, archive it with intention and review it quarterly.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "If it doesn't actively serve your team, then it's actively draining them."
💬 "You advise clients to focus and prioritize things. But is your agency actually practicing what it preaches?"
💬 "The best time to declutter isn't January 1st when you're trying to build momentum. It's now in December when you can create space before the rush of the new year starts."
TRANSCRIPT
It's a brand new year, have 47 things on your to-do list, 12 of them are marked urgent, and goals that you need to prioritize, and you're paralyzed. You're staring at your screen, unable to start anything. So today we're gonna address the priority paralysis. Let's get into it.
Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs or agency owners seeking actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. That's right. We're talking about processes and systems. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and their agencies know themselves, their processes and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and an amazing transition into the new year. I hope you got everything that you asked for on your Christmas wish list, but it is a new year. We are back with the creativity made easy podcast and it is a whole new opportunity that's in front of us. And so when a whole new opportunity gets put in front of us, oftentimes we get paralyzed.
But for Christmas, I received in my read category—if you don't know this, maybe I've talked about it before, either on the blog or on this podcast—but in our immediate family, we give four categories of gifts. Everybody gets four gifts, right? Something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read. And my something to read this year from my wife was a new bit of a memoir from Sally Mann. Now, if you don't know Sally Mann, she is a world renowned photographer who hails from my home state of Virginia.
And the book is called Artwork, which already you got me on the title, right? But it's her memoir on the creative life. It's just an incredible book. It's probably honest, raw look at the struggle of an artist's life. But I love this and I wanted to read this to you because I think it sets the tone for the topic today. And at the end of this episode, I'm going to be giving away a free copy of this book. So stay tuned to the end, whether you're watching or listening, stay tuned to the end to find out how to get your copy of this book absolutely free sent from me.
All right. Sally says this on page 97, if you have the hardback copy or you win the copy from me. She says, "The measure of artistic success is not money, it's time. And you must relegate it like the metronomic steps of the most unflappable beefeater on parade." She's got quite a vocabulary. "Let people make fun of my day timer, clutched to my breast like a rosary, but knowing what I have to do every hour of every day and every week of every month is what allows me to schedule. Yes, schedule creativity."
That's a lot of what we talk about on the show. It's pretty much the whole show. It doesn't drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the Muse. You have to clear a well lit and GPS coordinated landing strip for it, meaning for creativity. And that's what I want to talk about today. That's what I want to talk about this year. That's what I want to talk about each and every week on this podcast episode is the strategy of your creativity. Like it doesn't just happen, it takes work to go towards it.
And so when we talk about today specifically is this priority paralysis, right? We entered the new year, we have all these things, we have all these ambitions, we have all these goals. We also have some projects that were still lingering maybe from the end of last year that we still have to kind of finish to completion or we have clients who have rested over a couple of weeks and now they've come back with all sorts of new amazing ideas that they want your help executing, which is a great problem to have, but it can get really overwhelming really quick, right?
You might be a creative or an agency owner who's working like 60 plus hours a week and everything feels urgent and you can't distinguish from strategic or tactical. And the result ends up being that you're just spinning wheels, right? It's just busy work. You're not really moving forward, but your breakthrough moment is going to be realizing that the problem isn't time management like we read about. It's actually priority management. So it's a little bit even more micro into the big category of time.
Let's talk about the root cause of this priority paralysis, right? It's again, it's not a time problem. This is a clarity problem. All right. And there's three types of confusion that I want to address specifically that cause this type of paralysis. The first one is strategic versus tactical blur, right? So is this something that's going to move the business forward or is it just keeping the plates spinning? Is it strategic or is it tactical? That's one point of confusion that you need to clear up.
The other one is, is this task or project or priority mine or is it theirs, right? It's a mine versus their confusion. Should I be doing this or should someone else be doing this? Should I be delegating this? Is this really what my business does? Is this really what our department does? Is this really what I bring to the table?
The other one is, is it now versus later? This is the time, the time and confusion, right? Is this actually urgent? Or is it just the loudest thing right now? We've all been in a meeting where the loudest person who talks the most gets to dominate the conversation and no one else gets any input. And so you leave and you start moving towards whatever the loudest person talked about because they talked about the most and they hogged up all the time. Right. That's not necessarily the most urgent. It's just the loudest. Right.
Fifty eight percent of agency owners cite that revenue is their top concern. Trust me, I talked to agency owners all the time, every single week, and they're always talking about revenue, revenue, revenue. But listen, most agency owners and most creative business owners, they're working on urgent items, not important items, right? They're just spinning the wheel. They're not necessarily working on the strategic, they're working on the tactical. They're not necessarily working on what they should be working on, they're working on what someone else should be working on. And they're not necessarily working on what's actually the most urgent. They're actually just working on what's the most loud.
So let's get into one of the main tools that I use for myself and our clients to help them understand what is the most important thing for them to work on. We at Chief Creative Consultants combine two tools and merge it into what we call our priority framework, which you can get for free at dustinpead.com/free. Look for the giant button that says priority framework, but the priority framework is a combination of two tools. It's the focus funnel and it's the Eisenhower matrix. And I want to talk specifically today about the focus funnel. You can read more about the Eisenhower matrix on previous blog posts or even podcast episodes. If you just search my name and Eisenhower matrix, if you just Google that, you're going to find all sorts of stuff out there.
But what I do here is I start with the focus funnel. The focus funnel is this: ask yourself every task that you have, everything that's on your plate right now, there's 47 things, the goals, the urgencies, the things that are popping up already into the new year. You're going to put all those things through this imaginary funnel. Even if you need to kind of write it out and draw and move it through the funnel, you can. I've certainly done that before.
But you're going to ask yourself this. Number one, can this be eliminated? Can this be eliminated? Does this really actually need to happen? Or is it just busy work just spinning the tires, right? We don't even need it. Why is this even here? Coming off of a break like many of you have is a great time to look at it and go, what do we need this for? And we talked about at the end of the year, kind of cleaning up some of that stuff, but there still might be some residue of that coming into the new year. So can you eliminate it?
If you can't eliminate it, then it moves down to the next section of the funnel, which is automated. Is this something that we can automate? There's so many processes and system softwares out there, AI, all these different things that technology is endless these days, that we can take something that we think we needed to do ourselves or our team needed to do themselves and we can automate it. So can you automate it?
Now, if you can't automate it, then you move on to the next section. Can I delegate this? Is it actually me, right? Is it mine or is it theirs? Should I be doing this or should I be delegating it? Is this really what I need to be spending my time on?
And if it passes that and it's like, okay, I can't eliminate it, I can't automate it, I can't delegate it, it has to be me that does this, then you ask the time. Is it now or is it later, right? Because you can procrastinate. You can procrastinate, it's okay, right? The liberation of not now, right? It doesn't mean never, it just means not right now. It means that you can schedule it for later, right? Just like Sally Mann said in the book from the quote that I read earlier this morning, you can schedule that creativity. So that's the focus funnel.
Now, something else I want to talk about that we're gonna be talking about a lot this year is capacity. Now, I want you to think about when you're going through this focus funnel and especially when you get into the delegate portion of the focus funnel, I want you to ask yourself, is this something that you can actually or your team can actually take on? Do you have the capacity, right?
Priority paralysis happens because we say yes without checking ours or our team's capacity. And now we have too much on our plate and we have to decide what to do with it. So a little bit of a preview of capacity planning work. You can't prioritize it without knowing your actual capacity. It's a dangerous question: Can I fit this in? The right question is, does this replace something else? And if so, is that something else actually more important? That'll help you understand the priority in that capacity, right?
But we have a framework that I'm working on right now. It's going to be coming later on this quarter. The capacity planning framework, stay tuned for that. But essentially, it asks you to always understand that whatever your capacity is, you need to add about a 20% or subtract about a 20% margin in that, right? So if your capacity is, let's say the standard capacity is, you know, if we're talking time capacity, right? Standard capacity might be 40 hours a week. We're going to take 20% less than that and we're gonna say it's 32 hours not 40 hours, right? We're gonna say it's 32 hours not 40 hours because that would be 20% less than that, right?
So but in order to actually know that you need to start tracking your time on these tasks. How long does it take you to strategize for a campaign? How long does it take you to write copy? How long does it take you to edit in post-production? How long does it take you to pack up and tear down all your gear that you have to take to different shoots? How long does it take you to concept different logo designs? Understanding not just guessing but actually understanding that fact will help you every single time.
So in our "what now" I want to break it down like this for us this week. I want to talk about what to do today, what to do this week, what to do this month, and what you need to be kind of doing ongoing and then maybe like a next level portion as well.
So let's wrap it up this way all right. So today I want you to do an item purge or what I like to call a brain dump, right? Open up your task list right now. Run everything through the focus filter. Be ruthless, right? Eliminate, delegate, automate, defer it till later, procrastinate, be ruthless about it, right? And at the end of that focus funnel, I like to say this all the time, when you get to the end of the focus funnel, what actually ends up landing on your plate to do right now should be about 20% of what you started with. So let's say you started with 10 items at the top of the focus funnel. By the time you get down to the focus funnel and it's truly what you need to be doing now should really only be about two of those items. Not all 10 or not three, four or five, six. It's you really, if you're doing it right, you should really only have about 20%. So do that today.
This week, I want you to, in the next seven days, I want you to have a priority session for your weeks, whether it be 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it takes. You can do Sunday night. You can do Monday mornings. I myself do Sunday night so that I'm ready to hit the ground running on Monday mornings. Or if you're an early riser, you can get up early Monday morning and do this. And what you're going to do is you're going to identify your top three strategic priorities for the week. And everything else is either going to support those big three or they're going to wait, right? They're going to have to wait.
And so in that big three this month, remember that big three rule, right? No more than three major priorities active at once. Right. And if those three things happen to take all month, then those three things stay there. If one takes a month, one takes two weeks and one takes one week, then things are going to move in and out. But we're not going to continue to add and add and add. That's where priority paralysis happens every single time. And if you need help, you can go to dustinpead.com/free and download the DO versus DUE framework to help you work backwards and planning out your real deadlines. All right.
Ongoing. We're going to start working on this capacity check, right? We're going to start asking ourselves and finding out truly not just feeling. I feel like it takes—what is your actual current capacity? You're going to start tracking your hours available versus your hours committed. And you're going to see those times in real time data. And then you're going to build in 20% buffer for the unexpected. That's how we schedule our creativity. We're not going to live completely depleted at all times and maxed out. We're always going to allow ourselves for a buffer, whether we need it or we think we need it or not, because what's going to happen is it's going to get used up in some way, either inside of your work or outside of your work. It's going to get used up.
And the next level you can take if you want to after this episode is trying to figure out some kind of a decision delegation framework, right? You can start identifying these recurring decisions over and over again, like client requests and project scope questions and things like that. And you're going to start creating decision criteria for your team to use so that they can start finding out, they can start delegating and you don't have to even spend all your time or a lot of your time delegating. What it does is going to empower others to filter those things so that you can focus on the strategic and they can focus on the tactical.
Again, I want to remind you, you can find all my free resources, including the priority framework at dustinpead.com/free. You can find out more about me and Chief Creative Consultants and how we can serve you and your creativity and your organization at dustinpead.com obviously. And then you can follow me on social media at @dustinpead.
Next week, we're going to talk about why your team might hate your new system that you just rolled out or you're about to roll out. We're going to talk about change management for creative teams because implementing systems is not easy. And we're going to get people to actually use them. Imagine that—that's the real work.
I told you at the end of this episode, I was going to give you an opportunity to win this book. So just take one of the top five things that I mentioned here at the end of the episode, whether it be your focus funnel or weekly priority or your big three, or your capacity check, just tell me what you're going to do in the next week, in the next month and over the next quarter—something that you took away from this episode that you're gonna start implementing. And I want you to go to my YouTube channel. If you're watching on YouTube already you're already there. If you're listening to this, thank you for listening—hop over to the YouTube channel. You can just search Dustin Pead or Creativity Made Easy on YouTube and you'll find this episode.
And just comment on it. What are you going to take away from this episode? What are you going to start doing because of this episode? How did it impact you? If you comment on that, then I will run a random generator and I will pick one of you, reach out to you, and mail you your very own copy of Artwork by Sally Mann that just came out here recently towards the end of 2025.
And so I'll do that over the next week. So when this comes out on Thursday, January 9th, we'll close it the following Thursday, which would be January 16th. Let's say we'll close it January 16th at noon, because you never really know—is midnight the end of the day of that date or the beginning of the next date. I know it's like a 12:01 situation. Let's just be super clear. January 16th at noon, we're going to close it off. So you have until January 16th, 2026 at noon. If you're watching this much later, I'm sorry you missed the giveaway. Hopefully there's more coming. If you get caught up to live podcast episodes being released, but we're going to—if you comment on this episode on the YouTube channel, tell me what takeaway you're taking from this episode today. I'll give you until January 16th, 2026 at noon to make that comment. And then I'll random generator from those comments. And one person will win a copy of Sally Mann's book. And I will reach out to you for your details so I can send that book.
Thanks y'all so much for listening, for watching, for commenting, and for taking action in the new year. Let's get after it folks. I cannot wait to grow with you this year. It's gonna be our best year yet. I'll talk to you next week on Creativity Made Easy.