Choose Tasks Wisely

Welcome to Star Compass!

What’s inside this week:

🧑‍🚀 This Week’s Mission: How to choose between competing priorities?

🌌 This Week in Space: Three things worth your attention this week.

🚀 Ask a Rocket Scientist: Where is the US Space Academy going to land?

🔭 Next Step: After managing tasks, what comes next?

When I started at Amazon, I received valuable advice on ruthless prioritization. I was told when I started that my to-do list would be endless. To be successful, I must continually prioritize to get the most important things done and not worry about the items lower on my list.

Warren Buffett has a strategy attributed to him for ruthless prioritization called the 5/25 method. He suggests writing down your 25 goals. Pick the absolute most crucial five goals. Then ignore the remaining 20 items as an explicit “do not touch” list and ignore them completely. This is the only way you can avoid the distraction, energy drain, and false progress that result from a lack of focus.

I have experimented with this same approach not just for goals, but for tasks as well. I pick one most important task I must get done every day and two additional essential tasks. Two other nice-to-have additional tasks round out my five, but I still find other items creeping in.

If you can learn the focus of ruthless prioritization and limit the tasks you work on each day, you will be surprised at the progress you can make. Even today, after years of practice, I am still a work in progress.

A tool that can help you determine priorities is called the Eisenhower matrix, after the thirty-fourth president of the United States who founded NASA. Author Stephen Covey, in 1989, in his classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (#ad), created this four-quadrant tool. It was based on a 1954 speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower where he said, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

By evaluating each of your tasks by importance and urgency, you end up with four categories of tasks as shown in the following control panel figure created with ChatGPT.

For the DO quadrant, these are immediate actions that move the mission forward. In the short term, you need to address these tasks by setting time aside to get them done and remove any blockers in the way of completion. In the future, you want to get better at anticipating them, so the urgency is reduced.

For the DECIDE quadrant, these are actions that build long-term value. While not urgent, they mustn't get ignored by always reacting to the urgent. Set time aside to protect these things that matter before they become urgent by scheduling dedicated time to work on them in the future.

For the DELEGATE quadrant, these are important, but not ones you need to own. Avoid spending time on these tasks and develop systems that allow you to delegate these tasks to people for whom they will be important.

For the DELETE quadrant, these are tasks that don’t need to be done because they are not urgent or important. Eliminate them because everything you remove leaves more time to work on what matters.

“Our lives are not defined by any one action. Our lives are the sum of our choices,” Luther Stickell famously said in the 2025 movie Mission: Impossible-The Final Reckoning (#ad). Use this control panel to choose wisely which tasks are worthy of your efforts.

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📡 OPPORTUNITY: There are fewer of them than astronauts, and yet no NASA human spaceflight would be successful without them. Yet very few of them are well known today. I have been fortunate to work with a few of them.

They are flight directors, and there have been only 108 so far. But that number is about to increase as NASA is opening applications for the next class of flight directors on October 2, 2026, and closing on October 12, 2026. If you want to lead human spaceflight missions to the International Space Station, the Artemis mission to the Moon, or even a future human mission to Mars, learn more here.

📚RESOURCE: At the first Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) co-hosted Summit on Outer Space Heritage on June 5, 2024, our astronaut keynote speaker reminded all of us in the audience that preservation needed to go beyond the Moon to include the International Space Station (ISS) before it deorbited.

Astronaut Tom Jones was that speaker. He has gone on to be a speaker and writer after his career with NASA ended. He frequently reminds me of important details like this. Two years later, I am sharing some follow-up ISS space heritage initial results at the International Astronautical Congress on October 9, 2026.

A recent good example of his insightful work is his summary of the upcoming Artemis III mission.

🌎 COMMUNITY: This past week I participated in an AIAA Board of Trustees meeting. It reminded me that 2027 will mark 40 years of involvement in AIAA, dating back to my days as an undergraduate at San Diego State University.

While I strive to give back to a community that has given me so many opportunities, it is a debt I can never completely repay. No matter what stage you are in your career, I suggest you join the community of aerospace professionals that is the AIAA.

Where is the US Space Academy going to land?

- A friend in the space business

On September 10, 2026, NASA put out a Request for Information asking each State to submit one official response to support NASA’s assessment of potential locations for the United States Space Academy (USSA). The USSA is envisioned as a NASA-led, civilian Federal academic institution that will combine rigorous education and leadership development to prepare future scientists, engineers, astronauts, pilots, operators, entrepreneurs, civil servants, warfighters, and other leaders to advance the US aerospace sector. Responses are due October 26, 2026.

In determining locations, it is natural to start with the aerospace hubs. California, Texas, Washington, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, and the Washington, DC area are all logical places to consider given their existing aerospace communities of companies, universities, and government facilities. But the politics of the day often determine these decisions.

Despite Star Trek’s fictional Starfleet Academy being in San Francisco, California does not have politics on its side. This likely rules out Washington and Colorado as well. I think the DC area is unlikely, so that leaves Texas, Alabama, and Florida. The US Space Command is already moving to Alabama, so they already received their patronage.

I think Florida is the most likely choice, and ironically there is a fictional precedent for this pick. In the single-season 1996-1997 TV show about astronauts called The Cape, all aspects of human spaceflight were consolidated in Florida as opposed to being split between NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Got a question about navigating your aerospace career? Reply and ask. I’ll answer the best ones right here.

This week’s mission gave you tools to manage your tasks, which will quickly multiply in any new job.

Future issues will teach you how to manage your most valuable resource beyond time, make fast, good decisions, and get your best work done.

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