> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Mothers Run the Triage CEOs Pay to Learn - URL: https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/how-working-moms-prioritize/ - Published: 2026-08-28T16:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-28T15:59:59.000Z - Description: In July 2022, I published a triage protocol from inside a flu week. It is the same discipline executives pay retreats to learn, and mothers run it daily by necessity. - Author: Marissa Brassfield - Tags: Ambitious Motherhood, Simplicity & Elimination In July 2022, I opened a newsletter issue with the least surprising sentence I have ever published: "The inevitable has happened: my husband has the flu." Mike was down. As I wrote that morning, our son and I had "a nonzero probability of getting it, too." I had a client week to deliver and a 2-year-old to keep fed, on a body running on borrowed time. The issue I shipped that week was a triage protocol, written in real time from inside the week it describes. Any parent who has rebuilt a workweek around a fever knows the sorting that follows. The whole load comes up for review, every meeting and every deliverable, sorted by one question: what genuinely cannot wait? Most of us run that sort silently, then spend the evening, jaw tight, rehearsing an apology for everything that landed in the waiting pile. That silent sort has a name in my industry: strategic elimination. Executives hire coaches for it and book offsites around it. Mothers run it before 7 a.m. The gap between the groups is the teacher. One elects the lesson; the other gets enrolled without warning. After 20 years of coaching the first group while living in the second, I can tell you necessity runs the better classroom. **TL;DR:** Working mothers practice strategic elimination by necessity: the constraint arrives, a sick kid or a shrunken week, and the cutting happens or the week collapses. Executives practice the same discipline by election, in offsites and coaching engagements. Necessity teaches sharper, and the mother's sick-week triage is a protocol any leader can run. I have spent 20 years working with high performers: an 8.5-year run at Abundance 360, 500+ coached entrepreneurs and leaders from 31 countries, two ghostwritten bestsellers, and 20,000+ published articles. I have also been a working mother since April 2020, and since March 16, 2023 I have run a 3.5-day workweek, a schedule that survives on ruthless triage. The elimination strategies in this article come from both sides of that ledger: the coaching room and the school-pickup line. ## Something in you already knows what needs to go. One email a week that helps you find the thing to stop doing. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ## The Two Schools of Elimination Strategic elimination is the deliberate removal of commitments and obligations so the essential few get real resources. The discipline has two schools. In the elective school, the practitioner chooses the constraint: a quarterly audit, or a coach across the table. In the necessity school, the constraint chooses the practitioner. The elective school works, and I teach it. My own [strategic elimination audit](https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/what-to-stop-doing-strategic-elimination-audit/) runs four times a year in a calm 90 minutes with coffee, and [the real cost of saying yes](https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/strategic-elimination-multiplication-by-subtraction/) is a math problem worth doing in a quiet room. The elective school carries one structural weakness: attendance is optional. When a quarter gets loud, the audit itself becomes the first commitment cut. Whoever holds the scissors rarely notices the irony. The necessity school enrolls you without asking. A fever spikes during your biggest client week. Daycare closes at noon. The week you planned shrinks to a third of its size while the stakes stay where they were. Tuition is attendance, and attendance is mandatory. ## The 60,000-Hour Calendar The best data on executive time comes from Harvard Business School, where [Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 CEOs](https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-ceos-manage-time?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com) around the clock for 13 weeks each, 60,000 logged hours. The average CEO worked 62.5 hours a week and spent 72% of work time in meetings. The detail I keep returning to: the CEOs themselves conceded that many of their one-hour meetings could have run 30 minutes, or 15\. These are leaders with gatekeepers and chiefs of staff whose entire job is protecting the calendar, and the calendar still won. Porter had named the underlying law decades earlier, in the same journal: [the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do](https://hbr.org/1996/11/what-is-strategy?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com). Knowing the law and living under it turn out to be different sports. Now set the mother's calendar beside that one. Per the [2025 American Time Use Survey](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com), mothers with a child under 6 average 2.5 hours a day of hands-on care, against 1.7 for fathers. The bigger number hides below the headline: adults in households with a child under 13 log 5.1 hours a day of secondary childcare, a child in their care while they cook dinner or answer one more email. Five hours a day of doing everything else with one ear open. There, prioritization stops being a framework and becomes a reflex. ## Triage Was Invented Under Fire Triage entered medicine through [Dominique-Jean Larrey](https://www.cureus.com/articles/262825-dominique-jean-larrey-1766-1842-the-founder-of-the-modern-triage-system?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com), chief surgeon of Napoleon's army, who sorted the wounded by severity of injury instead of military rank and built horse-drawn ["flying ambulances"](https://theconversation.com/baron-larrey-napoleonic-inventor-of-ambulances-triage-and-mash-57893?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com) to reach them mid-battle. The sorting system that still runs every emergency room was designed under artillery fire. A century later, Dwight Eisenhower stood before the [World Council of Churches](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-second-assembly-the-world-council-churches-evanston-illinois?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com) and borrowed a college president's split between urgent problems and important ones; executive culture later shaped that split into the Eisenhower matrix. Both trace back to the same discovery: once the load outruns capacity, a sort you can trust beats raw effort. Larrey learned that under fire. The corner office learned it from a speech. My first triage system arrived the same way, scaled down. Early in my career I produced 20 to 35 short articles a day, five days a week, for three years, and edited another 250,000 in the same stretch. The method behind that output surfaced during a terrible cold, while I was sleeping most of the day under an unreasonable deadline and thinking, "Nothing will stop me. What can I do?" When I published the method years later, its origin got five words: "I discovered it by necessity." ## How Working Moms Prioritize When the Week Shrinks Working moms prioritize by consequence. The week shrinks first, the sorting happens inside the shrunken container, and whatever survives has proven itself essential. Everything else just demonstrated it can wait. Necessity grades the sort daily, which is why the skill compounds so quickly. I watched my own sort sharpen the month Pierce was born. In an essay I published one month into motherhood, I wrote that "external deadlines and urgent requests don't feel as important. They are OPP -- Other People's Problems." What did feel important, I wrote, was "soaking up every moment of newborn snuggles" and "protecting time for important activities like a hot shower or time in the morning to write and journal." One month in, my definition of urgent had been rebuilt from the studs. The output data backs the sharpening. A [Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis analysis](https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2014/october/does-having-children-lower-the-productivity-of-professionals-at-work?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com) followed 10,000 academic economists across 30-year careers and found that mothers, on average, out-produced their childless female peers over the long arc, with mothers of two or more children posting the strongest records. [Forbes ran the 2026 field update](https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisacurtis/2026/05/08/why-the-most-productive-person-in-your-hiring-pool-is-probably-a-mom/?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com): a dip while children are very young, then sustained outperformance. And when [Mothered Media surveyed working mothers](https://www.nprillinois.org/2026-06-08/maternal-strengths-what-data-shows-about-the-leadership-skills-of-moms-at-work?ref=ridiculouslyefficient.com) on which skills grew most after kids, the top answers read like an executive syllabus: time management, resource allocation, prioritization, negotiation. None of that is how the mothers I coach describe themselves. They describe the dropped balls. The day ends with a rehearsed apology for everything undone or unanswered, and that ledger gets kept as evidence against its keeper. I read the same ledger as a training log. ## The Sick-Week Triage, Written Down The protocol I published mid-flu in 2022 travels well beyond sick weeks. I have handed it to founders in launch season and to executives mid-reorg. Five steps: 1. Empty your head onto paper. List every open loop in whatever form feels easy, mind maps and margin sketches included. The goal, as I wrote then, "is to eliminate the worry about forgetting something important." 2. Circle the true essentials: "any important and urgent items that can't be delegated or delayed." Expect fewer circles than you fear. 3. Match the circles to your actual capacity. "Reflect on which of these urgent items you can do, based on your energy and cognition levels," and let a task shrink to a two-minute version if that is what today allows: an outline sketched, or a voice memo recorded. 4. Suspend your performance standards, on purpose, for the duration. "Comparing your distracted and/or sick self to your healthy self is a recipe for torture and anguish. Don't take the bait." 5. Keep a Not To Do list beside the to-do list. Mine holds everything I decline to make time for until the constraint lifts, each item parked without ceremony. Executives pay retreat pricing for weaker versions of this. The quarterly audit is this protocol wearing a blazer, run with more caffeine and less fever. (If you only have energy for one, run this one. The audit will still be there in January.) The mindset line I wrote under that flu has outlived the week it came from: "The paradox of productivity is that to do more, you must do less." That sentence has been load-bearing in my [3.5-day workweek](https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/3-5-day-workweek/) ever since. One honest caveat: the constraint that sharpens the sort also drains the operator. Necessity teaches fast and bills hard. The protocol exists because reflexes deserve scaffolding on the worst weeks, and because a sort you can run at 20% capacity is the only sort that counts. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Why are mothers good at prioritizing? Constraint with real stakes, repeated daily. A mother sorting a shrunken day sees the consequence of every cut by dinnertime. The Mothered Media survey reflects it: prioritization, time management, resource allocation, and negotiation topped the skills mothers reported growing after kids. ### What can CEOs learn from working mothers about elimination? That the discipline has to survive contact with a real week. The Harvard study's CEOs conceded their own meetings ran long even with staff guarding their calendars. The transferable move is treating constraint as curriculum: shrink the container on purpose, then let consequences grade the sort. My 3.5-day workweek is that move, institutionalized. ### What is triage by necessity? Sorting forced by a shrunken container, with stakes attached to every call. The word comes from battlefield medicine: Larrey sorted casualties by severity because resources covered a fraction of the need. Every version since, household or boardroom, carries that signature. ### How do I triage my week when a kid gets sick? Run the five steps above and shrink your planning horizon: in my own protocol, the temporary action plan covers "the next 4-10 days" at most. Brain dump first, so the worry of forgetting stops burning capacity, then circle only what truly cannot move. Let everything else wait. Skip the apology. ### Does motherhood make you better at your job? The long-arc data shows a real dip in the early years and a career trajectory that bends upward after, per the St. Louis Fed's 30-year analysis of 10,000 economists. My lived version: motherhood rebuilt my definition of urgent, and every business I have touched since has benefited from that stricter filter. A dip early, then a longer, steeper climb. ## One nonessential to eliminate before next week. One insight every Tuesday for ambitious professionals navigating major transitions. Five-minute read. Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ## The Credential Filed Under Survival If your weeks keep shrinking, run the sick-week triage on the next one and count what survives. If you have been running versions of it for years, uncredited, count that too. A week that collapsed to a fraction of its hours, with the essential still delivered by bedtime, was a masterclass in [the executive skills motherhood builds](https://www.ridiculouslyefficient.com/motherhood-is-executive-training/). Put the skill on your resume in whatever language the room respects: ruthless prioritization, or resource allocation under constraint. The mothers I coach keep discovering they already hold the track record, filed under survival. The Simplicity Protocol, my weekly newsletter, delivers one elimination to your inbox every Tuesday, a five-minute read sized for ambitious professionals mid-transition. Subscribe and make subtraction a standing habit instead of an emergency skill. What would you cut this week if you trusted your cutting as much as your doing?