Efficiency and productivity are two of the most popular topics among bloggers and tech writers. From the 4-Hour Workweek to Lifehacker, sites love to write about time-saving tips, tricks, and other ways to get your work done faster.

But what if working faster is only part of the answer?

Legions of middle managers insist that the answer is to "work smarter, not harder," which is presumed to work like magic and solve all problems. But the implication is that people were intentionally working "harder, but more stupidly." I've never worked with anyone who chooses to work that way.

So why doesn't everybody just work smarter?

The naive answer is that they simply don't know how to work smarter. 

Steve Jobs was lauded for his ability to keep the gigantic Apple incredibly focused on a relatively small product suite. Surely working on fewer problems is one way to work smarter. Apple enshrined this in the motto "a thousand no's for every yes." That's a good start, but it only addresses the ratio of things you choose to work on to the universe of possibilities. And most smart people would be able to choose one task to work on from a list of 1,001.

Unfortunately, tasks don't come in all at once, in a neatly-sorted Excel spreadsheet. They come in around the clock, in random order. Some are brought to us by an angry customer who we've let down. Some are camouflaged as important issues, but actually are not meaningful. Some are invisible, like improvements made to a product to solve a problem users didn't know they had. Sometimes, a relatively unimportant issue comes up every day. Prioritizing these tasks as they come in over time is a much harder problem than sorting a static list.

All of which is a good thing for Tim Cook and other executives, who get paid the big bucks for their perceived ability to set agendas and decide what is important.

But even if you work for Tim Cook, you still have to figure out some system to prioritize your work that helps you decide what to do right now.

Paul Graham wrote an essay where he discusses ways to choose exciting work. In it, he sets out a general exercise to help: "What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?" That gets a little closer to the sort of ruthless prioritization necessary to work efficiently, even if he was using it in a slightly different context. We've used this exercise as the foundation of our task management at ProjectLocker. Here's how:

We use Asana for task and project management. At a high level, as tasks (or possible tasks) come in, we create tasks in Asana. Periodically, we do a rough ordering and triage of the list to keep it manageable. Then, when it's time to pick something to work on, we grab a task from near the top of the list, assign our name to it, and start working. But there's a reminder in the comments right above the task list:

So right before you assign yourself to a task, you are faced with three questions to help you prioritize. And you'll know that you're accountable for the micro-prioritization you chose, so you will want to be sure you're always working on the one most important thing that you can do right now.

We don't worry too much about the overall ordering of our task list because as long as we always do the most important thing for right now, the ordering will be correct in the rearview mirror.

In a small, lean company like ProjectLocker, there are always a lot of important things that must be done. Always. Prioritization is often an exercise in splitting hairs. So we try to make it a little easier by including urgency in the exercise. So instead of the traditional:

"sort these 10 work items and work from the top to the bottom"

we like to ask questions with a little more finality:

"if you get to do one thing today and then you're done until tomorrow, what one thing can you do that will make a difference?"

This works well for us because the reality is that if you can get one single thing that will make a difference done every day, you're way ahead of the game. But the key is to not delude yourself into thinking that because everything is important/urgent/must have/highlighted!!!! that it should be the next thing you work on. 

How do you manage prioritization in your job?