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Which Work Makes the Biggest Impact — Prioritizing by Impact

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Opening: When the Busiest Person Gets the Least Credit

There are two engineers.

A is always busy. They respond to every Slack notification instantly, attend every meeting, and handle every incoming bug. Their day is packed, and late nights are common. By any measure, A works hard.

B somehow seems unhurried. They politely decline some requests, skip some meetings, and spend a large block of their day on a single thing. Yet at the end of the quarter, it was the feature B built that lifted the team's key metric.

In the year-end review, it is usually B who gets the higher rating. And A feels wronged. "But I worked far more than B."

The difference is not the amount of effort but the direction. A processed incoming work; B picked the work that would make the biggest difference. This article is about that "picking" skill -- prioritizing by impact.

"It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?" — Henry David Thoreau

1. What Is Impact

We need a definition first. Impact is not "the amount of work I did" but "the size of the result my work produced."

impact = size of the result x importance of that result

[volume of work] and [impact] are different.
- I wrote 1,000 lines of code -> volume
- That code lowered payment failure rate by 20% -> impact

There is one common confusion here: equating effort with impact. We want results proportional to how hard we toiled, but the world is not that fair. A refactor you ground through for days may have cleaned up code nobody uses, while a thirty-minute config change can transform the experience of thousands of users.

The first step in weighing impact is to ask, "When this is done, what changes?" If the answer doesn't come easily, the impact is probably small.

2. Important Work vs Urgent Work

Dwight Eisenhower left a famous distinction: "The important is seldom urgent, and the urgent is seldom important."

Drawn as a 2x2 matrix, it looks like this.

                Urgent              Not Urgent
            ┌──────────────────┬──────────────────┐
 Important  │  Q1 crisis/outage │  Q2 strategy/prevention │
            │  handle now       │  * invest here    │
            ├──────────────────┼──────────────────┤
   Not      │  Q3 noise/distraction │  Q4 time-wasters │
 Important  │  delegate/shrink  │  eliminate        │
            └──────────────────┴──────────────────┘

Most people get dragged around by Q1 (urgent + important) and Q3 (urgent + not important), because urgency delivers an immediate jolt. A notification rings, someone calls, a deadline looms.

But the place where impact compounds most is Q2 (important but not urgent): paying down tech debt, automation, documentation, better architecture, mentoring teammates. Nobody scolds you for skipping these today, yet they change the game when they accumulate. People who work by impact deliberately carve out time for Q2.

3. Frameworks for Weighing Effort Against Effect

The feeling that something is "important" is not enough. To decide what to do first among several things, you have to measure effect and cost with the same ruler. Look at two widely used scoring models.

3.1 The ICE Score

A good model for a quick gauge.

ICE = Impact x Confidence x Ease

Rate each from 1 to 10.
- Impact: how big the result is if it succeeds
- Confidence: how sure you are the effect will materialize
- Ease: how easily/quickly it can be done

Let's compare two tasks.

TaskImpactConfidenceEaseICE
Add payment retry logic987504
Redesign admin page UI573105

Intuitively the UI redesign might pull at you because it's "more visible and looks impressive," but the score points to payment retry: large effect for little effort.

3.2 The RICE Score

A more refined model that adds the scale affected (Reach).

RICE = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort

- Reach: number of users affected over a period
- Impact: per-person effect size (e.g., 3=massive, 1=medium, 0.5=small)
- Confidence: degree of certainty (% or 0-1)
- Effort: work required (person-months, etc.)

The virtue of RICE is putting Effort in the denominator. That is, for the same effect, the thing that takes less effort always wins. This is the heart of leverage. The high-impact person is not the one who pushes harder, but the one who finds the fulcrum that moves a bigger rock with the same force.

A caution: these scores are not answers but tools for conversation. Don't worship the number; use it to surface assumptions as a team scores together.

4. The Courage to Decide What Not to Do

Setting priorities is not about deciding what to do first. More fundamentally, it is deciding what not to do.

"The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do."
                              — Michael Porter

The moment you try to do everything, priorities vanish. If everything is priority one, nothing is. So people who work by impact deliberately maintain a "not-to-do list."

Declining is a skill. Not a rude "no," but a no with a reason and an alternative.

Bad: "That's not my job."

Good: "I'm focused on the payment issue right now, so that work will be hard this week.
We could revisit next week, or if it's more urgent, shall we re-prioritize together?
Let's decide jointly whether stopping the payment work to do this first
is actually better for the team."

Done this way, the decline becomes a negotiation -- weighing what to give up and what to gain together with the other person.

5. The Trap of Local Optimization

A classic trap when you misread impact is local optimization: optimizing only the small area in front of you while the whole, on balance, loses.

[local optimization example]

I improved my module's response time from 200ms -> 50ms. (satisfying)
But this module is used in only 0.1% of all requests.
The change a user feels is essentially zero.

Meanwhile the most-used module sits at 800ms and nobody has touched it.
Shaving even 200ms there transforms the felt speed for everyone.

We fall into local optimization because the small area we control feels safer and more pleasant. Big problems are complex, entangled with others, uncomfortable. So we unconsciously flee into easy, small tasks.

To avoid it, look one level up. Always ask, "How much does my work contribute to the goal of the whole system, the whole team, the whole company?" Finding the slowest bottleneck has more impact than building the fastest part.

6. Measuring and Communicating Impact

6.1 Measure — Decide the Metric Before You Start

To prove impact, you have to decide "what will measure success" before you begin. Looking for the metric after you finish is too late.

[decide before starting]

Target metric: payment success rate
Current value (baseline): 94.2%
Target value: 97% or higher
Measurement: success-vs-attempt logs, weekly aggregation

Recording the baseline first lets you state, later, "this much better" with numbers.

6.2 Communicate — Talk About the Result, Not the Activity

Impact is as much about making it visible as about creating it. If you quietly do something big and nobody knows, then at the organizational level it is nearly the same as if it "never happened." This is not self-promotion; it is also how the team learns what actually worked.

The key is to speak in results, not activities.

Weak (activity-centered):
"I refactored the payment module and added retry logic."

Strong (result-centered):
"I added payment retry logic and raised the payment success rate from 94.2% to 97.5%,
recovering roughly 3,000 failed payments per month."

Same work, but the second is far stronger because it shows the result and its business meaning together.

7. How to Find the High-Impact Work First

So far we've covered "which of the work already in front of me to do first." But the truly high-impact person goes one step further: discovering, before anyone asks, the work that will make the biggest difference. Beyond choosing well among given tasks, this is the stage of finding the work that needs doing on your own.

There are a few signals for finding such work.

[signals of high-impact work]

1. recurring pain     : the same complaint/outage/manual chore keeps repeating
2. work everyone avoids : important but annoying and complex, so nobody touches it
3. a big bottleneck   : one spot is blocked and many people wait
4. a quiet loss       : invisible but a daily leak (slow builds, frequent errors)
5. a coming change    : underprepared for upcoming growth/regulation/migration

Number 2 is the gem. "Important but nobody does it" has no competition. When everyone crowds toward easy, visible work, the person who picks up the hard, deferred core problem takes the biggest impact. That is why volunteering for the dirty work is often the fastest path to growth.

To find this work, widen your view. Don't just look at your own tickets; observe where the whole team most often gets stuck, which metric is most stalled, what people complain about most. Impact often hides not in code but in conversations, in retro notes, in the recurring sigh.

8. Anti-Patterns of Mishandling Impact

Classic patterns of losing your way while chasing impact.

  • Impact hunting: doing only the flashy, review-friendly work while dodging the less glamorous but essential maintenance. It corrodes the team's trust. Impact is for the team and the product, not for your own PR.
  • Obsession with numbers: the trap of treating only the measurable as important. You miss large impact that doesn't show in numbers -- mentoring, documentation, morale.
  • Hijacking others' impact: swooping in at the end on work someone else did 80% of and claiming the credit. It seems a short-term gain but costs you your reputation long-term.
  • Eternal analysis paralysis: never starting anything because you're still weighing what has the biggest impact. Prioritizing itself becomes the goal. Starting at 70% confidence beats stalling while you wait for 100%.

Good pursuit of impact is honest. It aims at what truly matters, not at what looks good, and at the team's result, not at your own credit.

9. A Case: A Team That Saved Its Quarter by Re-prioritizing

A small team at a startup was running five new features at once. All looked "important," and the team, scattered five ways, reached mid-quarter without properly finishing any of them.

The lead stopped everyone and they scored RICE together. The result was clear. One of the five (onboarding improvements) scored higher than the other four combined, because it was the point the most new users passed through.

The team made a bold call: of the remaining four, two on hold, two scrapped. Everyone converged on the single onboarding effort. Three weeks later, new-user activation rose 31%, and that became the company's biggest win of the quarter.

What is interesting is that the scrapped features were not bad ideas at all. They simply weren't the bigger impact right now, with these resources. Priority is not a question of good versus bad but of order.

10. Balance — Impact Isn't Everything

If by now you're asking, "so I should ignore anything with a low impact score?" -- no. Balance is needed.

  • Some impact doesn't show up in numbers. Helping teammates, building trust, improving the mood don't enter RICE but produce large impact over the long run.
  • Scores rest on assumptions. Impact and Confidence are estimates. They can be wrong, so don't worship them; revisit them periodically.
  • Some low-impact work must still be done. Security patches, compliance, hygienic maintenance must happen regardless of the impact score.
  • Trying to optimize everything exhausts you. Setting priorities is itself a cost. Applying RICE even to trivial decisions becomes another inefficiency.

In short, the framework is a tool that aids thinking, not a machine that replaces it.

11. A Practical Checklist

When starting new work or re-prioritizing:

  • When this is done, what concretely changes?
  • Effort vs effect? (Did I score it, even roughly, with ICE/RICE?)
  • Is this important, or merely urgent?
  • Did I carve out weekly time for Q2 (important + not urgent)?
  • What have I decided not to do right now?
  • Am I stuck in local optimization? (Is the overall bottleneck elsewhere?)
  • Did I record the success metric and baseline before starting?
  • After finishing, did I communicate the result as impact, not activity?

12. Impact as a Habit — A Weekly Ritual

Prioritizing by impact gains its power when it is a repeated habit, not a one-time resolution. One short ritual that comes around each week protects you from improvised busyness.

[Monday 15-minute priority ritual]

1. lay it out  : write down everything you could do this week (empty your head)
2. score       : give each item a rough ICE/RICE
3. cut         : circle the top 2-3, send the rest to "won't do"
4. protect     : pre-book focus time on the calendar for the top items
5. declare     : share with manager/team "this week I'm focusing on this"

Step 5 matters more than it seems. Declaring publicly what you'll focus on does two things. First, you hold yourself to the commitment. Second, those around you learn your priorities, and unnecessary interrupts drop.

Then on Friday, spend just five minutes looking back. "What had the biggest impact this week? What should I grow next week?" As these short retros accumulate, the very eye for impact sharpens. Scoring feels awkward at first, but after a few weeks you start to see an item's impact intuitively the moment you look at it.

In the end, the goal of a framework is to graduate from the framework. Once the ICE calculation is in your bones, you no longer draw the table -- "this is high effect for low effort" simply registers. At that point you have moved past the tool and gained a sense.

Closing

We often mistake busyness for diligence. But what an organization truly rewards is not the hours put in but the change produced.

Prioritizing by impact does not mean coldly calculating. It is closer to a respect for your own work -- a resolve to spend your finite time and energy where it matters most. The courage to decide what not to do, the perspective to see the big picture, the habit of honestly measuring and sharing results -- when these three come together, you draw a completely different trajectory from someone who worked the same hours.

Don't become the busiest person. Become the person who makes the biggest difference.

References

  • Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (important-urgent matrix)
  • Greg McKeown, Essentialism (do less but better)
  • Intercom — the RICE prioritization framework (intercom.com blog)
  • Sean Ellis & GrowthHackers — ICE scoring
  • Will Larson, lethain.com — leverage and engineering impact
  • Andrew Grove, High Output Management (output and leverage)
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