When everything is important, nothing is important. I remember reading this somewhere.
Prioritisation is always relative. Even if you had infinite time and infinite resources you should still prioritise.
The only time you don't need to prioritise is when you can do infinite number of things all in parallel at once. This is almost impossible because there will always be dependencies. If there are dependencies, now everything can be done in parallel. When tasks are distributed in time, sequence of tasks matter.
The task on which the most other tasks are dependent should generally be prioritised. The task which can improve the efficiency of all the subsequent tasks should be prioritised.
The easiest way of doing this would be to have a laundry list of all tasks and capture their priorities, dependencies, impact, effort, confidence and then let an algorithm optimise it for you. Well it may not be so simple, but you know where I am going with this. My Mind Map is my attempt at doing this with my life.
Introducing constraints is one simple way of allowing the priority you emerge. With my business teams at Grofers(between 2019 and 2021) . I ask them "Hey we're are doing some high impact changes at the tech backend, that will help us roll out the features quickly. We can take up only one feature this sprint, what do you want is to pick up?" This generally validates both urgency and importance.
Prioritisation Game
I want to create a game where each person in the business team will be given 100 coins every quarter. The coins expire after every quarter. They can decide how to spend their coins. They can allot it to any feature they consider important. Each sprint we just pick up the story with maximum coins allotted to it. As and when a story becomes more and more important the business team can start alloting more coins to that story. I want to experiment
Further reading
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All notes