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.