The 100-20-5 rule of prioritization
part 1.
When I first started at Amazon, I asked my skip manager Dan Callies a lame question ("what's the single piece of advice you would give me?") and he gave me a much better answer than I deserved:
At any given time, you will have 100 things to do.
20 of those things will be really important, valuable things that will move the needle for our business.
You will only have time for 5.
You can't delay anything, next week you have another 100 things. Nobody else has spare time, they have their own 100 things. Whatever you don't choose becomes a missed opportunity.
To survive at Amazon you need two skills.
One: get good at picking and justifying your five things. Choose deliberately.
Two: get even better at letting go of the other 95.
Focusing on these skills saved me as a fresh-from-college hire. Skipping 95% of a syllabus is literal failure to students, but that's how business roadmaps get created. Real workplaces are a mess of imperfectly-communicated opportunities you have limited time & money to take advantage of.
Low-margin companies like Amazon are always underresourced, so employees experience this choice more often. If you don't pick quickly and dodge the rest, the avalanche of choices eventually crushes you.
part 2.
When faced with 100 options how do you choose 5? I struggled with prioritization for years because I thought it meant finding the One Best Tool that would make decisions for me. I didn’t understand that prioritization is always a complex system that includes:
Goals. Shared, measurable targets provide the strategic backbone that keeps independent work aligned.
Tenets. Principles that help team members make faster, consistent decisions without consulting each other. Good tenets clarify common sources of indecision or ambiguity.
Evaluation. The tool: a method for quickly and consistently identifying high-value work by modeling its impact on your goals.
Choice. Picking high-value items to focus on and ignoring the rest. Speed matters: choose work you're more interested or skilled in than average.
Communication. Informing people of your choices and reasoning. You build trust by repeatedly exposing your choices to criticism and proving you’re listening, even if you stick with your plan.
Evidence. You cement trust by delivering the results you promised. Data wins arguments at Amazon and most companies, so plan what and how you will measure. Let your tangible results convince others to ignore the theoretical impact of the 95 things you pass on.
part 3.
The hardest part of prioritization for me is letting go of the things I choose not to pursue. For years my solution was brute force: I would work the extra hours. I would spend my free time practicing skills that stretched my capacity.
The worst part is, this works for a while. You can burn harder, fueling the fire with lunch hours and long nights and weekends—and eventually your body, mental health, and happiness. You might even call it success as your withered husk collapses in a pile of bank balances.
But how would you remember me? "Here lies Andrew; he never disappointed anyone." That's not what I care about accomplishing.
To escape that cycle and focus my time, I had to be honest about what validation matters most to me. It's not equal: everyone gets a dopamine hit from likes on insta, But some people build lasting happiness on that type of attention.
Be honest about what matters most to you: love from family, laughter from friends, freedom, likes & subscribers, respect from peers, comfort in spirituality, fame, the pride of your children, gratitude from those you've served, whatever. Then work toward a life that lets you prioritize those things more and more often. With practice and time the rest becomes background noise.