When building websites, we help our clients determine what the main purpose of each page of the site is for. At times, it can be difficult to narrow down to a single goal. At rare times, it gets a out of control and “everything on the page is important”.
If everything on a page is important, then nothing stands out and it’s just hard to read. All bold, all large fonts, and all a huge mess.
Greg McKeown said it well in his book Essentialism:
The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things.
For a page on a website, you need to find the goal for the page and have the content on the page work toward that goal.
Personally, though, I don’t follow that exactly and I tend to subscribe to the idea of the the “big three”:
- Three big things you want to tackle this quarter, working toward your yearly goals.
- Three big things you want to tackle this week, ideally with one or two of them working toward your quarterly big three.
- Three big things you want to tackle today, ideally with one or two of them working toward your weekly big three.
However you sort it out, you can’t have unlimited priorities or nothing will get done. Figure out what’s important to you and make sure to intentionally devote time to taking care of those things.
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