Most first year overwhelm is manufactured by having no order rather than by genuine volume. When every task carries the same weight, the mind treats all of them as urgent, and the resulting anxiety is about the undifferentiated pile rather than about any individual item. Sorting the pile is most of the relief.
Cash comes first because running out of it ends the business while everything else merely delays it. That means invoicing work already delivered, chasing anything overdue, and completing whatever triggers a payment. These are frequently the tasks that get deferred because they feel administrative rather than productive, which is exactly backwards.
Existing customers come second because they are the cheapest revenue you will ever have and the most damaging to lose. A customer waiting on you is a reputational cost accruing quietly, and the work is already sold. New business feels more urgent and is almost never more valuable than finishing what somebody has already paid for.
Everything else is genuinely everything else, including most of what feels pressing. Marketing, admin, tools, and improvements have no deadline that is real, however loudly they present themselves. This is where the majority of a first year list sits, and treating it as a third tier rather than as competing priorities is what makes the first two achievable.
The practical version takes ten minutes. Write everything down, mark each item cash, customer, or other, do the first two categories in order, and review the third once a week rather than continuously. Most of what is in the third category will still be there in a month, and its continued presence without consequence is evidence that it was never urgent.
If everything genuinely is in the first two categories, that is a capacity problem rather than a prioritisation problem, and the answer is different: raise prices, decline work, or get help. Reordering a list that is genuinely all urgent does not help, and recognising which situation you are in prevents applying the wrong remedy.
Do the sort in the evening for the following day rather than in the morning. Deciding what matters while you are fresh and unpressured produces a better order than deciding it while the first messages are already arriving, and starting the day with the list already made removes the period where everything looks equally important.