Strengthen your thinking · Area 02 of 06

Identify What Matters Most

How to find, challenge and focus on the thinking, conversations, decisions and actions that matter most.

Explore the other areas

Why it matters

Most of us give our best thinking to whatever shouts loudest. Quality attention is your scarcest resource, and where you point it quietly decides the shape of your life and the lives around you.

When you have identified what truly matters, for yourself, your family, your team, your organisation and your community, that attention finally has somewhere to go. You stop spreading yourself across too many priorities and give the few that count the quality of thought they deserve.

A question to sit with

What is most important for me, my family, my team, my organisation and society to think about, decide on and act on?

How our Thinking Squad could aid you

Your guides here are people from the Thinking Squad, matched to you and to how you want to grow. They work one to one, and with groups and teams.

Each guide is qualified and informed in their area, with one mission: to elevate the quality of your thinking, conversations, decisions and actions.

Book a discovery call

Identify What Matters Guide

Key focus areas

What really matters Strategic prioritisation Focus and alignment Impact orientation

Specialist Subject Experts

Key focus areas

Scaling SMBs Designing the future Boards and strategy Innovation and growth

The Thinking Marketplace

Start here

Our five top picks for this area, chosen from the full shelf for this area. Each one earns its place.

Start here book

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Greg McKeown · 2014

The clearest case ever made for doing less, but better. It gives you a repeatable way to sort the vital few from the trivial many, and permission to say no to the rest. If this pillar had one core text, this is it.

About 6 hours (272 pages)

book

The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

Peter F. Drucker · 1967, definitive edition 2006

Drucker wrote the original playbook on putting first things first and it still reads fresh. You get the discipline of asking what actually needs doing, not what is merely urgent. Sixty years of leaders have tested it and it holds.

About 5 hours (208 pages)

video

How to Make Hard Choices

Ruth Chang (TED) · 2014

A philosopher reframes the choices that matter most: when options are on a par, you get to decide who you become. It changes how you approach the big calls where no spreadsheet can save you. Fifteen minutes that reshape years of decisions.

15 minutes

podcast

The Knowledge Project

Shane Parrish (Farnam Street) · 2015-present

Long, careful conversations about how the best thinkers decide what deserves their attention. You will hear researchers and operators explain how they separate signal from noise. It rewards a walk or a commute better than almost any show.

60 to 90 minutes per episode

book

Measure What Matters

John Doerr · 2018

Once you know what matters, this shows you how to hold a team to it. Doerr's OKR system forces you to name a handful of objectives and drop the rest. The Google and Gates Foundation case studies show it working at scale.

About 7 hours (320 pages)

See the full shelf for this pillar

Keen to explore more by yourself?

Be the first to hear

Curious about a guided experience?

Book a discovery call
← Explore the other areas Next: Make Time, Energy and Support for Better Thinking →

Get started

Book a discovery call

Opens the calendar from Calendly, which sets its own cookies. Nothing loads from Calendly until you choose to open it.

© 2026 Maximy. All rights reserved.

Privacy Policy Terms & Conditions Cookie Policy