My executive coaching clients tell me it’s tough to avoid distractions that pull them and their teams away from strategic priorities. Readers worldwide write to complain about too many priorities and not being allowed to focus on strategic priorities. Across every organization, there is too much to do and yet it’s common to see many hours devoted to less important tasks while strategic priorities languish. What’s to do?

1. Be clear about your strategic priorities.

You can’t protect strategic priorities if you don’t know what they are. To know what they are, you must understand both the organization’s strategic direction and your individual contribution.

• What game is your organization playing and how does it intend to win?
• What does the organization have to become in order to succeed in the new game?
• What assets and capabilities must it acquire?
• What is your contribution to this transformation?

Most strategic shifts require significant change. To identify them, you must examine everything from mindset to skills to standard practices to equipment and space. Many strategies fail because the organization fails to understand the scope of the change and they never become an organization capable of creating the desired value and delivering it reliably and profitably. I learned this in one of my earliest strategic planning projects. They didn’t need a new strategy; they needed to become a new organization!

2. Distinguish between strategic priorities and day-to-day priorities.

In a nutshell, strategic priorities are the initiatives that allow you to become the organization you need to become to meet future customer expectations and succeed according to your latest business game plan.

Meanwhile, your most important day-to-day responsibilities involve creating value for which existing customers are already paying. Obviously, you don’t want to let existing customers down unintentionally. Thus, these non-strategic, but important day-to-day tasks, which usually come with deadlines that create urgency, have a way of squeezing out the strategic, often longer-term initiatives that don’t seem as urgent.

However, you will never become the organization of your vision without tackling those strategic priorities. You must find and preserve the needed time and resources to keep moving each one of them forward. The first step is to make that critical distinction so strategic priorities aren’t constantly relegated to the back burner.

3. Recognize the source of non-strategic distractions so you can keep them at bay.

I guarantee your to-do list is filled with items that are neither strategic nor critical for meeting commitments to existing customers. Nonetheless, I bet you would categorize many of them as urgent and/or important. But let’s look at where some of these tasks have come, why they aren’t so important, and how they manage to take up so much space on your to-do list:

• Meeting action items – Poorly planned meetings lead to wondering conversations. Wondering conversations generate lots of ideas, many of them good, but not necessarily strategic or critical to customer commitments. However, high performing employees, in an effort to justify the time spent in a meeting, will insist upon establishing action items whether anyone has time for them or not. There will always be too many good ideas. You must be ruthless to keep them off your to-do lists. If every meeting opens with clearly defined outcomes that further critical commitments and strategic priorities, this random source of busyness will cease to exist.
• Problem resolutions – Most problem resolutions solve nothing because the solution fails to eliminate the cause of the problem. However, there is one thing these “solutions” do incredibly well: they generate extensive to-do lists and drive tremendous activity! And since the “solutions” usually fail to solve the original problem, they promise subsequent rounds of activity as subsequent “solutions” are implemented. Before falling for these plans, insist upon confirmation that the actual cause of the problem really has been found and that the solution really does eliminate that cause. Until you are convinced, refuse to add these tasks to anyone’s list!
• Email inboxes – Email messages are double trouble. First, since they gush like a fire hose, they create artificial urgency. After all, if you don’t tend to your email regularly, you and anything of importance will be buried alive. Second, email messages drop requests, directives, suggestions, and great ideas into your lap day and night. It is an endless stream. And while some of the ideas and suggestion are truly great, few are essential to meeting customer commitments or making significant progress on strategic priorities. The requests and directives are usually either incredibly vague or totally bureaucratic. Be ruthless. Push back. Measure every idea against your top few priorities and hit delete as fast as you can for the vast majority of incoming messages.
• The Internet is another major source of ideas that can weasel their way onto to-do lists. Schedule and monitor your reading and browsing time with care. You definitely want to be informed, but you don’t want to get sucked into setting up new systems, downloading new tools, or establishing new accounts that will just consume more precious time.

Don’t let random tasks unrelated to customer commitments and strategic priorities find their way onto your to-do list. Figure out how the unimportant tasks get on your list and take action to shut that door. Any idea that won’t accelerate your ability to move the strategic needle or satisfy a customer more quickly deserves to be ignored with haste and decisiveness.

4. Use a disciplined decision-making process to protect strategic priorities.

If you follow my process to SOAR through decisions, your strategic priorities and customer commitments will always be in the forefront and unimportant tasks will have a tough time getting on your list in the first place. If you make decisions the way most people do, you won’t make them in relation to your top priorities. Your to-do list will grow and grow as you create work for yourself and others.

5. When overloaded, don’t choose the most popular and worst method for managing the overload.

When you have too much to do, there are only six options for dealing with overload, five of which are effective. Most people choose the only ineffective option: wishful thinking. By not consciously choosing a better option, you can only hope for a miracle. Keep your eye out for a phone booth so you can dash in and don your superhero costume. Nevermind that phone booths have all gone the way of the dinosaurs. Pare down your growing priority lists before you have no priorities at all!

Know your priorities, measure all distractions against them, and focus ruthlessly! Those are the secrets to moving the needle on strategic initiatives so you can become the organization of your vision.

Ann Latham is an expert on strategic clarity and author of The Clarity Papers.

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This article first appeared on Forbes, March 29th, 2018.