The North Star Filter
Most capable people don’t have a capacity problem. They have a subtraction problem.
Something new arrives – a good idea, a reasonable request, a thing that genuinely needs doing – and it goes on the list. The list grows. Nothing comes off. Six months later they’re busy in every direction and wondering why they’re not making the impact they wanted to make when they took the job.
What’s missing is a filter.
The North Star as a decision tool
A North Star is usually treated as a destination. Something motivational and directional, useful on a strategy day and quietly forgotten until the next one.
Its real job is different. A clear business North Star – where the company is going, what success looks like for your team, what you’re all collectively trying to build – becomes a decision tool in the everyday. When something new lands on your desk, the question stops being “can I do this?” and becomes “does this belong in my top five?”
Without that filter, every request looks legitimate. Urgency gets confused with importance. Being visible gets confused with being valuable.
The replacement rule
Keep a live top five. The five things that, if you do them this week and nothing else, move you furthest toward your outcome.
When something new comes in – and if you’re good at your job, things will keep coming in – there’s one question: does this displace my number five? If yes, five comes off and the new thing goes on. If no, it goes on a list for later.
The failure mode isn’t having too many priorities. It’s growing the list without ever running that test. Five becomes eight becomes fifteen. The filter disappears. What you’re left with is a collection of intentions dressed up as priorities.
A list of fifteen priorities isn’t a prioritisation system.
Your North Star, not just the business one
The business has a North Star. So should you.
Why are you in this role? Not what the job description says – what would make this role feel worthwhile? What would you want to be able to say you made happen?
This matters because your manager’s urgent requests and your own North Star won’t always point the same direction. When they align, the filter is easy. When they don’t, you need to know which one governs. The best people I’ve worked with can tell you exactly what they’re trying to make happen. When someone can articulate that clearly, the prioritisation conversation becomes much easier. When they can’t, you’re both working from different maps.
The small team superpower
This is why small teams can outperform much larger ones. Not despite the constraint – because of it.
A team of 200 can afford diffuse effort. A team of five can’t. That constraint, applied well, creates a level of focus that larger organisations genuinely struggle to replicate.
JH has always operated this way. Not because we wanted to limit what we do, but because our North Star has always been to never be average. What we see elsewhere is a pressure to add services, to cover more ground, to look bigger on paper. The cost is quality – you spread across more things and you become ordinary at all of them. We chose the opposite: whatever we do, we do well enough that it’s actually worth doing.
The Davids who beat the Goliaths find their advantage in different ways. But they all have to work out what their slingshot is – their North Star, their real point of difference. And when they find it, the way they get there isn’t by being stronger. It’s by being smarter.
When your agency extends the list
Here’s where the constraint gets interesting. It isn’t quite as fixed as it looks.
A great agency can extend your effective top five. Give them genuine autonomy over the right work – the things you’re happy to invest budget in but don’t want to spend your own time on – and your list can be six, seven, eight, without spreading yourself thin. The capacity goes up. The filter still applies. The difference is: the agency is running some of those decisions, not just executing your instructions.
But this only works if you share the North Star. Not just the brief, not just the outputs you want – the direction of travel, what matters, why. A good agency will ask you for this. A great one will suggest where they can carry more so you can focus on what only you can do.
Going on that journey together is what changes the relationship from vendor to partner. When an agency understands where you’re trying to get to, they start surfacing things you hadn’t thought to ask for. That’s when the relationship becomes genuinely additive rather than transactional.
The trap worth naming
You can follow this rule perfectly – a disciplined top five, a clear North Star, a great agency running alongside you – and still have none of it connected to your actual outcome.
This happens when the list gets assembled from whatever’s loudest. Five things that are all urgent, all credible, all defensible – but none of which move you toward what you’re actually here to do. You’re busy. You look productive. You’re not making your impact.
The filter has to ask: does this serve my North Star? Not just: is this important enough to be on the list?
The things that genuinely serve your North Star are often the least urgent, the least visible, the hardest to defend on a busy Tuesday. They’re the ones that get pushed to six. They’re the ones to protect.
Knowing yours
Some decisions will still be hard. The North Star just tells you which ones are worth wrestling with.
Know yours. Share it – with your team, your manager, your agency. That’s not a vulnerability. That’s how you get people pulling in the same direction rather than filling your list with their reasonable requests.
Focus isn’t what you choose to do. It’s what you choose not to.