Growth And Promotion 5/6: Prioritization

Key points:

- 💡 Prioritizing important tasks over urgent but less important tasks is key to career success.
- 🔔 Urgency often creates false importance, like notifications that demand attention but don't actually matter.
- 🔥 Focus on tasks that are both urgent and important first, like handling emergencies.
- 🚫 Learn to say 'no' to tasks that are urgent but not important in order to focus on high-impact work.
- 🤔 Many tasks we put off are important but hard, and tackling them first can improve productivity.
- 🏗 Break down large, difficult tasks into smaller pieces to make consistent progress every day.
- 🪨 Think of your day as a jar: put the big rocks (important tasks) in first before filling it with sand (small tasks).
- 👥 Delegation is key to efficiency: give away tasks you’ve mastered to others so you can focus on higher-value work.

Starting at Amazon as a Senior Manager, then Director, then Vice President, Ethan has decades of experience at top tech companies. This career growth course is developed from his own knowledge and input from his extensive network of fellow coaches and executives.

- Connect with [**Ethan on LinkedIn**](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/)
- Taro members get a discount to join [Ethan's Level Up community](https://levelupwithethanevans.substack.com/taro25)

Key points:

💡 Prioritizing important tasks over urgent but less important tasks is key to career success

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American multinational technology company which focuses on e-commerce, cloud computing, and much more. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it has been referred to as "one of the most influential economic and cultural forces in the world".

Ethan Evans is a retired Amazon Vice President (VP) who now coaches managers to grow into executive roles. He became a manager after only six months in an IC role, at a startup in the 90s. He ascended quickly across several startups before taking a "demotion" to be manager when joining Amazon in 2005. Across 15 years at Amazon, Ethan rose to become a VP, a title he held across multiple orgs. He left Amazon in 2020.

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanevansvp/

We all have the same 24 hours in a day - The difference is that some are able to get far more out of it than others. Here's what they're doing that others aren't.

The clearest way a company can acknowledge your growth. At the end of the day, you can't solely interview your way to a principal engineer; promotion is the true foundation of your pay and career.