Which things should you prioritize that will have the biggest positive impact in the coming year? The first step in prioritization for efficient business, professional, and personal life improvement is not to prioritize. Instead, identify what can and should be de-prioritized.

Virtually everyone has busy lives. It’s always difficult to add more tasks to complete in a day, which is why prioritizing new goals in addition to all of your current responsibilities frequently doesn’t work. There’s a high risk of overload and burnout.

Instead, take things off of your plate. Get rid of unimportant elements in your life that don’t provide you value. If you already have a GAMEplan, you have a great idea of what your critical tasks are for this week, month, quarter, and year. What’s getting in the way of those important projects? What detracts from them, and what supports them?

You will likely find that many tasks that seem necessary might not actually contribute much value to you. Test these things by asking, “If this didn’t get done this month, does that really matter?” If there isn’t much consequence to your most important goals, removing this task from your plate will clear up time and space for more pivotal projects.

One way that you can identify some of these disposable items is to maintain a daily to-do list. Write down all the tasks you will try to complete that day. Anything that doesn’t get completed gets moved to tomorrow’s list. If you notice that certain items never seem to get done and keep getting moved forward, it’s time to reconsider their importance and likely remove them from your list.

If they are tasks that must get done but aren’t very important, these are great items to delegate to others. Payroll is a great example. This ever-present responsibility detracts the business owner from focusing on working on the business, and they likely aren’t experts in this field anyway. Remove this burden from your mental space and focus on developing a major project. This outsourcing will likely cost money, but think of it as buying back your most precious resource: time.

Where can you buy back your time? The more time and energy you have to spend on needle-moving tasks, the greater progress you can attempt and the greater your chances of success.