Your To-Do List Isn't the Problem. Your Priorities Might Be.

Written By Heather Shelstad

A better way to decide what to stop, start, and continue when everything feels urgent

If you're a marketing leader right now and your to-do list is quietly terrifying you, this one's for you.

Picture the scenario. The academic year is winding down. B2B buying decisions are closing in. Funding uncertainty is hanging over everything. And your next big campaign launch is on the horizon. If you work in edtech, you know this stretch. It's the highest-stakes window on the revenue calendar, and it all converges at once.

So before you panic over your to-do list, or lose sleep over your project board, it's worth pausing and asking a different question: are your priorities actually the right priorities?

Why this moment matters more than it used to

This isn't just a busy season problem. It's a resourcing problem playing out across the entire marketing profession. Gartner's late-2025 survey of senior marketing leaders found that budget and resource constraints are the top challenge for 63% of CMOs heading into 2026, and half say short-term demands are crowding out long-term strategy (Gartner, "CMOs' Top Challenges & Priorities For 2026," December 2025).

That's the honest backdrop for every marketing leader trying to plan a quarter, a launch, or a team's week. There's real opportunity in that pressure, though. Teams that get intentional about prioritization right now aren't just protecting their sanity. They're building the muscle that will separate them when resources stay tight and expectations don't.

The framework everyone reaches for first

Many marketing teams default to an exercise like "stop, start, continue" at moments like this. It's a great starting point. The concept is a simple feedback model that originated in the business world as a method for performance appraisal, giving teams a structured, easy-to-understand way to reflect on what's working and what isn't. Over time, it moved beyond performance reviews into retrospectives, planning cycles, and team check-ins of every kind, precisely because the format is so easy to run.

Here's the honest gap, though. Stop, start, continue tells you what to do with the categories. It doesn't tell you how to decide what goes in each one. And when the pressure is on, that's exactly where teams get stuck. Everything feels like it should continue. Nothing feels safe to stop. That's when a good exercise turns into a two-hour meeting that ends with the same priority list you started with.

A fun, priority-setting framework that resolves the debate

Here's the approach I've used with teams when the pressure is on. It gives "stop, start, continue" the criteria it's missing, and as a bonus, it makes a genuinely useful team activity when you run it as a group.

Can't Fails. Start here. If the successful execution of the tactic or priority directly ladders up to a business OKR or revenue outcome, it's non-negotiable. It's called a "can't fail" because if it does fail, the business loses. Protect these at all costs.

Must Haves. These are the table-stakes tactics that keep momentum alive, with a helpful gut-check built in: are your must-haves actually performing? This is the season to double down on what's working and consider deprioritizing experiments. You can get back to running experiments when bandwidth returns.

Nice to Haves. Ask honestly: Does this really need to happen right now? Check with your manager and stakeholders before you punt on anything, but don't be afraid to question it or hit a momentary pause.

Aspirational Big Ideas. This is my favorite prompt to bring to a team. What if we could go bigger on one thing? What would it be? If a bold idea could outperform something on the Can't Fail list, it's worth exploring the tradeoff. Even in a crunch, thinking big matters.

Run your stop, start, continue list through these four tiers, and the debate mostly resolves itself. What lands in Can't Fails and Must Haves generally continues (possibly scales and improves). What falls into Nice to Haves becomes your stop or pause list. And Big Ideas gives your team permission to be creative, start something new, on purpose, deliver impact, and have fun while doing so.

In my experience, this kind of layered approach delivers individual clarity, team and company alignment, and maybe even a good night's sleep. Used well, it's more than a prioritization tool. It's a way to protect your energy, or your team's energy, during the most important weeks of the year.

More resources on the stop, start, continue approach

If you want to go deeper into the underlying method, a few resources are worth your time:

(Side note: I’m an Emily Kramer fan girl - highly recommend following and subscribing to premium content). 

The takeaway - there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

Your to-do list isn't lying to you. It really is full. But a full list and the right list aren't the same thing, and the gap between them is where good marketing leadership shows up, and a thriving team persists. Before your next planning cycle, pause on the stop, start, continue exercise and run it through the Can't Fail, Must Have, Nice to Have, and Big Idea lens. It takes the same amount of time as a status meeting, and it leaves your team with something a status meeting never does: real alignment on what matters most, and maybe even a little pumped for the work ahead.

Have a prioritization approach that works for your team? I'd love to hear it. This is exactly the kind of question I love working through with marketing leaders and teams as a fractional CMO.

Heather Shelstad
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