Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Vox Pop: What we talk about when we talk about "priority"
Merlin Mann | Feb 12 2007
Since the Bronze Age of personal productivity, conventional wisdom has taught us the importance of priority in deciding how to plan and use our time. And, in the abstract, anyhow, that notion of putting your time and attention into those things that are the most valuable to you seems so "obvious" as to be a tautology, where "productivity = acting on priorities." (Of course, whether people's execution of the things they claim are important always maps to their stated intentions is another matter for But, we can probably agree that in the post-Lakein world of productivity and time management, everything from Covey's Quadrants to the Pareto Principle to the four criteria to -- what? I dunno -- firewalking, has been used to help us train our attention on the things that need us most and provide the greatest value in our world. Priority. But, in practice, what the hell does "priority" really mean? I come at this from the angle of a GTD fan, in the sense that I try (try, mind you) to see priority as one of several factors that govern where my time can and should go. But, it's no secret that even the most diehard GTD fan struggles with how to execute a busy day during which this and this and this and, oh crap, **that** all need to be done as soon as possible. How do you manage it all? Well, one way is to apply some of the many affordances that various productivity tools offer: priority stuff is big, and it's red, and it's bold, it's at the very top of the list, and it's stuck on a sticky note in the middle of the monitor; anything to make sure we don't lose our most important work in the lights. So my question to you guys: what does "priority" really mean to you in practice (not theory)? Does it represent the highest value item in your world -- that for which you will reject other work? Is it the thing that's currently causing the most stress and anxiety? Or is it the thing that you're the most behind on and are therefore the most horribly embarrassed about? What makes you set an item's priority to the "high" setting, and then how does that help it to get done faster? Does priority planning ever fail you? I've got my own theories, but I want to hear what you guys think in comments. (And, of course, my apologies to the late Raymond Carver.) 40 Comments
POSTED IN:
 The highest priority model breaks...Submitted by Patrick (not verified) on February 13, 2007 - 10:18am.
The highest priority model breaks down when the value of priority of an item as a function of time is not constant and you do not reevaluate priorities on a frequent enough basis. The concept I mention here is an information theoretic/signal processing interpretation of priority. In signal processing there is the concept of the Nyquist theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannonsamplingtheorem) which says that in order to represent a signal without aliasing (a type of nasty artifact), you have to sample the signal at 2 times the value of its bandwidth). Real world example: Humans hear roughly 20 Hz - 20 KHz. What is the sampling rate of all the MP3s you listen to? 44.1 KHz, or about twice the frequency spread of human hearing. What, though, does this have to do with priorities, you might ask. Nothing, if the priorities for all your projects is constant and never changing. You make your list once and it stays like that. However, what I've found, is that over time, priority of a given item varies. Usually the priority goes up as you approach a mythical due date, though sometimes it might go down for other reasons. Because of this, I've noticed myself getting confused by not "sampling" my list enough and reevaluating priorities. While Project A is important right now and Project B is less of an issue, the next thing I know, Project B's priority has approached infinity and I'm deadlocked as to what to do, because I didn't "sample" priorities frequently enough to know what truly is important. This probably sounds like babbling, but when you consider that all this stuff we deal with is about information and that these mathematical concepts I mentioned are all about the theory of information and its content, it doesn't seem completely out there... at least not to me, and maybe not to an engineer or mathematican out there who might read this. » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
