Prioritization, Decision Making: Focus on What Counts

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

A list of priorities with nine items on it is not a list of priorities. It is a list, and the sequencing will be decided later by whoever follows up most persistently.

Prioritisation is not the act of writing things down. It is the act of deciding what will not happen, in writing, before anyone asks.

Why the choosing does not happen

Everything on the list is genuinely worth doing, which is exactly what makes it hard. Saying no to something reasonable requires a reason, and most people do not have a framework that produces one. So the list stays long, work gets done in the order requests arrive, and at the end of the quarter the important thing is the one that did not move.

Then measurement makes it worse. The indicators were chosen because they were easy to extract, so the effort flows toward whatever was measurable rather than whatever mattered. And your own week disappeared into other people's urgency, which nobody planned and everybody accepted.

How the course is built

Thirty-six lessons in five parts. OKR first, twelve lessons across two levels — the short version for a manager and a team, and the full company implementation. Not as goal tracking but as a mechanism for deciding what not to do: the "from X to Y by Z" format, the quarterly cycle, and scoring honestly at the end, which is the step most companies quietly skip.

Then measurement. Eight lessons on indicators: critical success factors before measures, impact mapping, the traps, the reporting hierarchy, and the six myths that break most measurement systems, including the one about tying indicators to pay.

Judgement and your own week

Then six lessons on critical thinking, which is where prioritisation stops being preference. Strong reasoning against weak, the biases that distort every estimate — anchoring above all — and decision models for the cases where nobody has the facts: OODA, Cynefin, cost-benefit.

And finally the personal layer. The time audit that shows the gap between what you believe about your week and what the calendar says. The Eisenhower matrix and 4D. GTD, time-blocking and the golden hour. Then delegation, taught as a decision rather than a hope: RACI, matching difficulty to skill, and how to stop taking the work back when it comes out different from how you would have done it.

Who is teaching this

Mike, the number one HR instructor on Udemy. More than 1.6 million course enrolments, over 150,000 professionals trained, PHRi and SHRM-CP certified, HRCI representative in more than 10 countries. I built the people function of the unicorn Preply and worked at Wargaming, Alfa-Bank and iDeals. The OKR section includes the Preply and iDeals rollouts, and both took two cycles before they worked.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all course materials

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Practical assignments and real business cases

• A section with additional courses, tools and resources

The exercise this course lives on

Write down everything you intend to achieve this quarter. Then cross out everything below the top three and do not quietly keep them. If crossing them out felt impossible, that is the skill this course teaches, and it is not a time management problem. Enrol now and start the first lesson today.