Merlin Mann with a brilliant essay on priorities, and why you can have only one:
A priority is observed, not manufactured or assigned. Otherwise, it’s necessarily not a priority. You can’t “prioritize” a list of 20 tasks any more than you can “uniqueify” 20 objects by “uniqueness,” or “pregnantitze” 20 women by “pregnantness.” Each of those words means something….
It’s not a question of order or shuffling. It’s a question of brutally honest decision-making and constantly saying, “No, I have another thing to take care of.” Because, once you see what’s really there — once you know about an idea or a thing or a person or whatever that you’d reject 10,000 other things to protect and nurture — you’ve found your priority. And, consequently, you’ve discovered a bunch of other things that aren’t allowed to be priorities any more.
I’m probably just tired and cranky, but this strikes me as the most naive, illogical argument I’ve seen in years. Some pull quotes:
First, ask yourself why any “high priority” item has remained unresolved in your life for more than 60 seconds. Why isn’t it done completely?
Because some items take more than 60 seconds to resolve.
I’m staggered whenever a Director-level or higher executive claims they have 3, 5, 7, or 27 “priorities.” Because, at that level, your entire career is defined by the unbelievably great ideas that you reject. Painfully giant, wonderful, terrific opportunities that you simply don’t have the capacity to address without screwing up the real priority.
di·rec·tor (d-rktr, d-) n. 1. One that supervises, controls, or manages.
If I have 3, 5, 7, or 27 people on my team, I could easily have 3, 5, 7 or 27 priorities.
I think what Mr. Mann is trying to say is that you can only have one priority AT A TIME. If you’re working on your mudroom when your daughter falls down and screams, your priority switches from the mudroom to your daughter. Once your daughter has stopped screaming, your priority likely switches back to the mudroom.
I have many priorities in life: my wife, my children, my friends, my job, etc.. At any given moment, I’m intensely focused on one of them, but it doesn’t mean the others aren’t priorities. They’re just not the top priority right now.
Re-prioritization doesn’t have to take the form of a daughter falling down and screaming. Say I’m at work and my wife calls. I answer the phone and she says, “Have you got a second to talk?” At that moment, I have to re-prioritize. If I’m in an important meeting, I may tell her I’ll call her later. If I’m eating lunch, I may talk to her right away. Or, maybe I’ll ask her what it’s about, weigh some pros and cons and either decide to talk to her right now or wait until later (or do a little of both).
Denying that this process exists is either semantic gymnastics or an extremely limited world view, IMHO.
Don’t worry, Brian, I’m quite inured against both tired and cranky. I do have to live with myself, after all.
I think you’re missing one of the points of Mann’s essay. His blog was one of the founding sites for what’s come to be known as the “cult of productivity” — people who endlessly research and tweak their own life-management systems. Mann’s point is to argue against the search for the perfect tool, and the ongoing (and futile) quest to come up with some programmatic way to input your life, prioritize *everything*, and pop out a “what should I do for the next five minutes” result.
Keep in mind that Getting Things Done recommends keeping a “Someday/Maybe” todo category in which you’re supposed to capture *everything* you think about which you might want to do *someday*. As a result, GTD fanatics (and I count myself among them) tend to capture enough projects to fill ten lifetimes.
There’s nothing wrong with this, IMO — the theory behind GTD is that if you write it down, it’s less likely to plague your brain. The problem is when people put endless energy into deciding whether “learn to play klezmer” is more or less important than “learn to speak Italian” — which are two of my someday projects which I doubt I’ll ever quite get to.
More to the point, based on the way you talk about your life, and the hours you manage to keep, I’m of the opinion that you are a prodigy of executive function, and that a lot of what these systems attempt to do comes naturally to you. If this argument sounds illogical to you, I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that we’re dealing with a mental process which you complete intuitively, but which bedevils the hell out of the rest of us.
Well, I’m not sure exactly what you just said, but I came away from it very impressed with myself.
So, er…thanks. I guess…