The Parking Lot Theory
Adding a priority feels like ambition. What makes a strategy is what you had the nerve to take off the list, not what you added to it.
Ask a founder what their top priorities are this quarter, and you’ll usually get seven.
Ask what they took off the list to make room for the new ones. Most of the time, nothing did. The list just got longer.
When a client brings me a list of fifteen or twenty things, I don’t help them build a bigger plan. I ask which three matter right now, and get everything else off the page.
Subtraction is a strange kind of multiplier. Cut a list from twenty things down to three, and nothing about those three has changed. What changed is how much of your time, your attention, and your energy is now behind each one. Adding a goal is easy, anyone can want more things. Taking one away on purpose, so the ones left get everything you have, is what changes the outcome.
Most founders skip that part. A new opportunity shows up, it looks reasonable on its own, so it gets added. Nobody sits down and asks what has to come off to make room for it. The list grows every quarter and shrinks almost never. Seven priorities without a single cut is just a wish list with a deadline attached.
The Parking Lot Theory noun
Pick the three things that matter most right now. Park everything else, on purpose. Don’t plan the parked ones. Don’t feel guilty about them. Set a date to come back, three months is usually enough, and leave it alone until then.
Here’s why the list keeps growing. When something new shows up, founders ask one question: is this worth doing? Almost anything can pass that test on its own. Nobody asks the harder question: worth doing, compared to what it pushes out. A priority only means something once you know what it beat to get on the list.
Priorities are the most obvious place this shows up. They are not the only one.
Three places subtraction pays off more than addition.
What you say yes to.
Pick three priorities instead of twenty, and each one gets the hours, attention, and follow-through the other seventeen were quietly pulling away from it. Nothing about the three gets easier to do. They just stop competing for what they need.
What you sell.
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, the company had around forty products, and barely anyone, customers included, could explain what most of them did differently from each other. He cut the line down to four: one desktop and one laptop, one for regular people and one for professionals. The four that survived did not get better on their own. They just stopped splitting Apple’s engineering, marketing, and money nine ways.
Where your time goes.
Every standing meeting on your calendar got added for a reason that made sense at the time. Most of them are still running long after that reason stopped being true. Cut the ones that do not serve your three priorities, and the hours you get back go straight to the work that matters most, instead of leaking out through a dozen small commitments nobody remembers agreeing to.
What it looks like when someone does this.
A client of mine, a coach and trainer in her own right, came to me a few months ago with twenty things on her list. All of them felt urgent. None of them were going anywhere. She was walking through one of the hardest personal seasons of her life, and instead of giving herself room to feel any of it, she was trying to outrun it with work. The plan had gotten heavier than the problem underneath it.
I didn’t give her a bigger plan. I gave her the Parking Lot Theory. Pick three things: the three that matter most right now. Park everything else. Don’t think about the parked ones. Don’t plan them. Just park it, and come back in three months. Three things. That’s it.
“That voice, the one that says do more, plan more, push more, isn’t always ambition. Sometimes it’s just noise. And noise, when you’re already carrying too much, is the thing that keeps you stuck.”
A client, on what parking the list took
Parking the other seventeen didn’t mean giving up on them. “It meant I stopped letting them crowd out the three that actually needed me right now,” she told me. She picked a physical goal she cared about, a project she’d been meaning to build, and a solo trip for herself. Two of the three are already done.
Warren Buffett gave his own pilot a version of the same instruction. Mike Flint asked him for career advice, so Buffett had him write down his top twenty-five goals, then circle the five that mattered most. The other twenty, Buffett told him, don’t come back to later. They go on a list to avoid at all costs, because they’re good enough to pull your attention away from the five that matter, without ever being good enough to replace them.
“Strategy is what you took off the list, not what you put on it.”
Coach Sid
Fix Your Blind Spot
Run the Parking Lot Theory before your next planning conversation.
A strategy that costs you nothing to keep isn’t really a strategy, just a hope with more steps. This is how you find out what it’s costing you.
The Parking Lot Theory, step by step
- 01Write down everything currently living on your list, urgent-feeling or not.
- 02Pick three: the ones that matter right now, not the ones that are loudest.
- 03Park the rest, on purpose. No planning them. No guilt about them.
- 04Set a return date three months out, written down somewhere real. The parked list is still there, just not due yet.
Coach Sid
The Founder’s Bottleneck Audit
Ten minutes to find out if your real bottleneck is even on your list.
A free 10-question audit for scaling founders and next-gen leaders. The same questions I ask in a first coaching session, so you know whether this pattern is the one holding your business back, or something else entirely.
- 10 questions that surface the pattern costing you most
- A personalised result with your top three blind spots
- One concrete shift you can make this week