I triage all my priorities. I think of them as patients in a waiting room. Where are the multiple gun shot wound victims and where are the sniffling colds? The gun shot wounds go first with the idea that the sniffling colds will turn into black plague if I don’t deal with them sooner rather than later.

What determines they are a gsws are the projects I have going (home and work). Some days my kid’s hospital visit is takes priority over anything I get paid for. This makes my priority system pretty flexible, which is the main reason I steered away from Covey and went the GTD route.

Gotta get back to it before coughing grandpa turns into a walking time bomb.

1 is doing what I will be happy to have done a week/month/year from today, #2 is getting done what the bosses will yell at me for if it is not done, #3 is doing what will make my clients happy, and #4 is doing what makes me happy.

Usually, most things done under #1 also fulfill #2, and those almost all have to do with #3, which leads to #4.

I use have the following priorities

1. What I get paid for
2. What will increase my families security & happiness
3. What will avoid grief
4. What will improve my financial position
5. What could I get paid for
6. What makes me feel warm & fuzzi

mercenary tinged with just enough mush

I will have to say that my priority, in work anyway, is “what’s next?” I pretty much flow on a linear timeline. Priority is very situational as I view most things in life. What is needed the soonest on a calendar is what I work on next unless all hell has broken loose and I have to attack that. So I would say for me priority depends on due date and “oh crap” quotient. Probably too simplistic but there you have it. I have found no reason to over-think it past that.

For me, priority is essentially just the inverse of the consequences of not doing something — so if the result of falling through with something would be very very bad, it ends up very very high on the priority scale.

For me, there are two types of priority. 1. Project Priority. 2. NA Priority. The way this works is that all of my Projects (someday and current) get two metas… Aspect and Priority. An Aspect is related to the roles I play in life (student, husband, father, employee, etc..). The Priority is within the particular aspect. In my role as a father I may need to “Fix daughter’s bike” and “Build Playroom for daughter.” Fixing her bike may be prioritized higher than building her playroom since it is what she has been asking for and she is not aware of the possibility that she could be getting a playroom of her own. This allows me to make sure that I have current projects that are fair to all of my aspects of life (if I have 5 aspects and 5 current projects, then I should have one project per aspect) and that my projects are having as immediate gratification as possible. This is all to try and keep certian aspects from always over-riding others. The Aspect is assignent to a project as soon as it enters either the current or somday list. This way, if school and work have been throwing things at me faster than I can catch… I can quickly look at my lists and make sure to at least crank out a few smaller projects for other Aspects so that those are not feeling completely ignored. I may not get the “Kitchen remodel” done right now, but I will at least get the “Make wife’s favorite dinner” done so that she knows I am still thinking about her while pulling my hair out on a paper for school. As far as NA priorities, this is more obvious. If A has to happen before B, then A has a higher priority than B. Example: A is a school project due on wednesday, and B is Hanging a shelf for the Wife. Both I wish to get done today since I want to keep both School and Wife happy, but A will get a higher priority and get attacked first since the shelf could wait another day if nessisary. I obviously try to keep the OH Sh!t aspect of priority out of the picture, but this system allows for some of that when nessisary.

I think the difficulty is that “priority” can mean either (i) Urgent - “Do now, or else very bad consequences!” or (ii) Important - “Do now, or else you’ll never acheive the dreams and life-goals this task helps you move closer to.”

The motivation for the Urgent items seems to be ‘external’ — expectations, deadlines, etc. others (including yourself) have put on yourself. The motivation for the Important items seems to be ‘internal’ — desire, hopes, dreams, things you want in life. I find that the daily-grind often makes me define priority more based on Urgent rather than Important, external demands rather than internal hopes/desires. Covey’s 4 Quadrants really helped to capture this in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but in practice it is very difficult to implement. You have to be able to work on both Urgent and Important tasks simultaneously. This is why I think David Allen’s notion of ‘instinct’ is important, even if it is next-to-impossible to explain (p. 199 in Getting Things Done - “The Moment-to-Moment Balancing Act”). The key, it seems, is regularly reviewing the the entire inventory of horizontal (runway-tasks) and vertical (30-50,000ft dreams & goals) weekly — no-matter-what! — so that when you are in-the-moment you can trust your ‘instincts’ more.

This year I started by making a very small list of goals - three things that I began last year, but never really got around to that will dramatically improve my business in the long term: “Top 3 Goals for this year”. I also wrote down the “Top 3 Administrative Tasks for this year”, which are somewhat more amorphous (keep income above $xx), or less interesting (get a collection of contract templates together) than the 3 Goals. So, each Monday when I review the previous week, I make notes about progress made on those 6 items, and challenges (For instance, a client problem which distracted me from spending a few hours on one of my main goals) and write down possible solutions (“Use all day Wednesday to work on Goal X”). I have also tried time blocking this year, so each weekday is broken into segments for various types of activities (“Administration”, “Planning”, “Billable Client Work”, “Writing”, etc), which really keeps me focused on the task at hand. So, if I am in my “planning” time, and an email comes in from a client, I don’t look at it or respond to it until “Client” time. Of course, on the topic of priorities, this helps me generally keep a balance, so that any one things doesn’t get completely neglected, or take over every waking moment. Of course it’s not perfect, sometimes very urgent things will come in, and I will have to rearrange my “blocks” for a day, but at least I have to do it consciously, and violating my blocks for more than a few days gets very uncomfortable! In terms of priorities inside each of those blocks, it depends on the block… For Admin, it is often the more urgent (deadline on a bill payment) or what is getting most irritating (dealing with mailing a big box that is in my way), or what serves my other current priorities (ordering a piece of software, etc). For client work, it’s on a bit of a first-come/squeaky wheel/deadline basis which determines when individual tasks or projects get prioritized. For more defined goals/projects its generally on a step-by-step next action basis. So, to agree with you, Merlin, priorities are less set in stone and more shifting sands… and as to what actually gets done, there is also a fair amount of available time/energy, mood, opportunity, etc that gets mixed in! I’ve often tried to do the quadrant prioritizing or the A-B-C, or whatever, but that seems to fall apart and cause guilt. This new system is working a bit better for me right now.

I think that priority is a bit of a boondogle. I think I use it as a way to motivate myself, rather than to track some real value that I attach to the task. I can’t tell if this is a reault of my not having a coherent system for task management (i.e. a GTD newbie) or if it is inherent to the idea of prioritizing. When I mark something as high priority without a deadline (not self-imposed, but hard) it has no effect on my likelyhood of accomplishing that task. For me, in practice anyway, priority = due today.

In my opinion, priorities have nothing to do with tasks and everything to do with projects (speaking in GTD terms). Which project is most important? The one that, with the fewest resources, will enable you to reach your goal, whatever that is.

Let’s say I have a goal of making $100,000 this year, and I have two possible projects that will enable me to do so. Project A will require 1,000 hours of work. Project B will require 500 hours of work. Which project gets first priority? Project B, because its results-to-resources ratio (dollars per hour) is higher than that for project A.

Project B includes 50 tasks that will be required for its completion. Which of those tasks is most important? The question is meaningless, because all of the tasks will have to be done if Project B is to be completed. They are all equally important. And that’s why priority applies to projects but not to tasks.

Of course, you could identify which of the 50 tasks should be done first, but that’s not a matter of importance; it’s a matter of sequence.

I try to have only two priorities: Really Bad Things (firing, tongue lashings, no supper) will happen if I don’t get this done today and everything else. In reality, there’s Someday/Maybe/IBNU (Important But Not Urgent) floating around to be cleaned up, but it still seems to work well enough from an organizational perspective.

Priority is the lever where the fulcrum exists closest to you so that small actions on your end have the most impact on advancing your cause. I wrote up some thoughts last week drawing the analogy of priority to the “power band” in kite surfing -> http://www.scrollinondubs.com/2007/02/08/kite-surfing-startups-and-the-power-band/ The power band is a small window directly downwind and generating maximum power is about keeping your kite in that window as long as possible. Anything you do on the periphery has negligible effect on forward progress. This is a very similar skill to keeping focused on tasks which have the greatest ability to advance your cause throughout the day. sean

I’m self employed so the firing/tongue lashing/no supper priority isn’t really an issue. For me high priority is one of two things - it’s either the task that will create the most value when it’s complete or the task that is most important even if it may not directly create value. That may mean there is a time limit or expiry date of some sort or it may just be something that I know needs to be done, even if I don’t really want to do it.

This is one of the areas that I struggle with in my GTD system. I try to keep my next actions list current with things that I’m actually working on and that need to get done. If it isn’t high enough priority for me to do “next”, it shouldn’t be there. So my next actions all tend to be high priority items and I just pick them off one by one.

My struggle is that there are naturally some things that deserve a higher priority than others, and I wind up doing a mental priority check anyway. I should probably use some sort of prioritization in the list so it’s off my mind.

Inspired by a friend of my who recently joined the GTD cult, I have finally started using priorities on my next actions to make sure that I actually use them appropriately. I found myself doing things that I knew had to be done and not checking my NAs because there were a lot, and the ones that really needed to get done now rarely seemed to be at the top. It was work to find them.

Here’s my new priority system. It’s in iCal / Palm, so the levels are High, Medium, Low, and None. The inspiration from my friend was to prioritize based on timeline.

• High: Has a due date and it’s very important (i.e. one of the 5 milestones to finishing my Ph.D.)
• Medium: Has a due date and it’s not High priority
• Low: No due date, important
• None: Needs to get done, but no due date, not as important

Everything else goes on Someday/Maybe or gets trashed as something I don’t really want to do. This has helped a bunch. Of course, things that have to happen on a given day go on the calendar, but if you have something due in two weeks and it will take you eight workdays of effort to do it, it won’t do you much good just to have it on your calendar, even if you’re in the habit of looking ahead.

I had some problems where I’d miss due dates because I wasn’t doing this. It’s not a problem anymore.

For me, urgent is anything that’s going to cost me money, time, or grief if it’s not done. That could be not finishing a project at work or forgetting to get my wife’s drycleaning.

Everything else is either ‘Important’ or ‘Someday/Maybe.’

Priority means that it has to get done ASAP. It generally means that there’s a hard deadline coming up—say, I need to make signs for an event that’s happening tomorrow. Either it has to get done now or it doesn’t get done at all. It means that I have to work on it right now, to the exclusion of other, less important tasks.

I find prioritization inescapable in implementing a GTD system. The beauty of GTD is not that it does away with priorities altogether, but rather than it encourages flexible, on-the-fly prioritization. Priorities are things that I have to do right now—they’re the things that are causing me the most psychic stress, the things that will have the biggest emotional, material, and psychological payoff when they’re completed.

The way I manage priorities is with index cards. Every incoming item goes on a new index card. I use the two minute rule to decide whether to send the index card to my stack of actions/projects. The stack itself is a representation of my entire world—usually sorted by context. A couple times during the day, I go through the entire stack, pulling out the highest priority items. Reviewing all my “stuff” helps give me a sense of control. Being able to pull out particular actions/projects allows me to focus in on the most important stuff. That’s how I handle priorities.

The biggest challenge re: priorities. How to stay on top of crucial, but less important stuff, when I’m in the middle of a do-or-die project. Because I know that all of that other stuff will soon become a crisis if I don’t stay on top of it.

Things that I feel under pressure to complete go at the top of my list and get the big red letter treatment. All this seems to do is to make me more likely to procrastinate further. Maybe I’d be better to hide it somewhere in the middle of my list and then I’d probably just get on and do it.

Many of you have excellent systems for managing your priorities but what is a priority? Jonathan, in the first comment, said “Really Bad Things” and I agree. The definition can be made more general - “Will not doing this task cause me pain or doing it give me pleasure and when will the effect happen?” Judgment comes with balancing the various causes and effects, for example, watching my son’s hockey game today gives me more pleasure than having write a report in 2 days however, if the report is due today the pain might outweigh the pleasure!

A good boss (wife, child, parent) will consistently reward performance, encouraging you to do better. A poor boss will punish non performance, encouraging you to avoid future tasks. Priority comes down to two factors - impact and time to impact.

(Which is why big problems such as climate variability have low priority - the impact is beyond the next electoral cycle)

I trust my intuition when it comes to priorities. I used to try to prioritize everything, but I realized it was unnecessary — I already know what’s important, and what needs to get done today. I think it comes from experience … you know what you need to do today so that deadlines will get met, you know that if you don’t start on this now, it won’t get done on time, and, if you are staying focused on your goals, you know what you need to do to further your goals along. I also find it useful to set my three MITs first thing in the morning, when my head is clear and I don’t have a million things coming at me.

At work priority for me is whatever my boss says it is. We are usually left on our own, but I know if he mentions something needs to get done, I shouldn’t be working on anything else.

At home and in regards to school/freelancing, I have no definition of priority. I know what needs my attention and when, which can all be subject to change based on the needs of my family and friends, available time, my mood, psychical and emotional health. I find if I try to tag something as priority it causes a lot more stress because I’m thinking of it as a priority, instead of just adjusting to what I can get done at a particular time and place.

( time required to complete task / time available to complete task ) * weight of consequences if not completed by due date

Where I start from: Priority is a relative term. It is therefore logically impossible to assign a priority to an action in isolation. It is also logically impossible to assign a single priority to an action. Each action will have different priorities depending on the alternatives surrounding it.

In pratice, I find it helpful to use just three tags that help me assess priority in the moment:

• work (is the item more or less directly supportive of my productivity goals?)
• chore (is the item something I need to do to keep functioning, like gassing the car)
• time (does the item have some sort of real deadline associated with it, or at least a clear drop off in relevance after some point in time).

For me, priorities represent the proximity to two hot spots: avoiding pain and creating my ideal life. The closer an activity gets to either of these hot spots, the higher the priority.

I never use the “priority” function because all priorities are always “1”. Or “top”. Or “biggest possible”. There is never anything that doesn’t need to get done right now, this instant. If it didn’t need to get done right now, I would never have remembered to write it down in the first place.

GTD back-slider

Priority is that which will get me in the most trouble/be most embarrassing if not done.

Changing a baby’s diaper is a priority above almost anything.

However, priority and importance to one’s future aren’t the same. I’m not a fan of Covey, but I do like his quadrant system of priority/urgency on one dimension, importance on the other.

I use Todd V’s distinction. I don’t care about priorities, since the “context of temporal urgency” is everything. Some weeks there are things that must get done by certain days, and those are top priority.

On other weeks, when I have more time, I can say “what issue/proposal/deadline 2-3 weeks down the road could benefit from more thinking time today?”

In theory, more of the latter helps alleviate the former; in practice deadlines always seem to clump together opportunitistically and make some weeks a lot more hectic than others.

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.

to me setting priorities makes me less próductive. productivity means making the maximum progress in a given time frame, say a day. If there’s anything I need to do first for the sake of priority (usually because I forgot it realier, it got delayed or came down on me by accident) I can no longer work in the perfect order that suits me. The perfect order gets the most done on a day. Yes, I avoid priorites whenever I can. Making mistakes is something that really slows anybody down. Sometimes it’s better do nothing and relax.

For anything else: common sense is always priority one !

I only use priorities for actual deliverables, or some product that I must deliver. A report, analysis, or somesuch. Everything else is dynamically managed, and I do not assign them priorities.