Prioritization and Getting Things Done
September 11th, 2008 Oliver StarrCategories | Features | Getting Things Done | Software
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Doreen Hartzell, one of the Co-Founders of Enleiten, a GTD-based web application. Doreen was recently on the GTD Applications Panel at the just-concluded Office 2.0 Conference. I asked her to contribute to GTDtimes and this is her first guest posting.
After my panel at Office 2.0, and sharing our GTD-based web app with some of the crowd there, the question of prioritization kept coming up.
The discussion usually goes something like “it’s an interesting methodology, but I really need to be able to prioritize all my work, and there’s no way to do that”. In my experience, that’s not true, you’re just framing the idea of prioritization differently than most systems; you’re making priority an explicit decision about what deserves your attention. That judgement happens as part of your daily and weekly reviews.
You start by prioritizing along hard deadlines and framing out your time. Appointments that must happen at a certain time and date go in the calendar, and become commitments that you’ve said are more important than anything else you could work on that week at that time. By making them scheduled items, you’re implicitly saying that you’ll not take any new, incoming work or think about the rest of your to-dos to work on those scheduled items.
Then you pick out what I think of as soft landscape pieces: tasks that need to happen at any time on a given day. By building them into your workload on a given day, you’re saying they also have a high priority and that you value them enough to give them a specific, time-determined commitment, but that they aren’t important enough to promise to block out conversations and calls and emails to get them done.
As a final filter, you review your open projects. You look at the topics and themes that matter to you (Horizons of Focus in Allen’s terminology) and then look at your project list. Move most of that project list to “on hold” status, and leave active the projects that are the most valuable toward achieving your long term goals. Use the landscape pieces in your calendar to figure out how many projects you’ll realistically have time to fit into your schedule. These are your medium priority tasks- you’re making a judgement that they matter enough to commit to working on them, but not enough to make hard and fast promises in your calendar about when you’ll do them. If they were higher priority, you would commit to a given time.
Low priority tasks, in my interpretation, are everything on hold. If I finish everything active, I can move on to them. If I have a small window of time that doesn’t fit my active work, I’ll skim a context list and grab one of those as filler.
Once you’ve made these judgments, you’ll have a pretty short short list of things to do, compared to your overall project list. And when the inevitable flurry of incoming messages and calls and requests starts to arrive, you compare those to your active projects. Is anything coming in higher priority than what you’ve committed to in you hard landscape and thought are medium priority projects? If so, you’ll bump the tasks that don’t have dates and times associated with them and take on the incoming work.
Priorities in this model aren’t about assigning a flag to something to remind yourself that it matters. Instead it’s about making a commitment of your time and focus to a subset of your possible work and letting the rest be stored in your trusted system until you review again and reevaluate those commitments. And leave time for friends and family and real human interaction. If your work-related tasks and household administrative stuff will fill your schedule from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep, you can skim that active projects list and find the point at which you need to set that aside and go enjoy a relaxed evening with your loved ones.
Due dates are another piece of meta data for any given task that will determine priority. A good tool has to automatically bring those tasks to your attention in an appropriate amount of time.
Add that feature to what is listed above and your system should mostly be determining your priorities for you.
I had a pretty interesting question about priorities on my post about GTD prioritization. I wonder if you might weigh in on it if you have a min. Seems you have a good grasp on this area.
Also where do you recommend keeping track of the soft landscape items, as you’ve called them here, so they’re not “in your head”? I ask this as I know that would be the question the commenter above would have about your post.
I work well with David principles in complex (service) projects and daily actions.
Meetings and other stuff that MUST be done have dates; the SHOULD dates not. Never.
The “should” ones shall come to your desk, you can be sure, if you review them in each week; if not, your boss or customer shall remember you‚Ķ The majority of jobs have daily unpredictable items and urgencies, and other not urgent but time consuming to read and analyse. You must give them the space they need or you can be doing unnecessary stuff in the wrong moment. If you put dates only in the MUST ones, you only need to review the others, the SHOULD ones, regularly (weekly for me, or when some new important information changes the rules / scopes / so on; and you have to do it, because there are “shoulds” that become “musts”, “musts” that become “shoulds” or “one day” and new information that changes projects.
Thanks, Michael - I’ll go check out your post as well.
I keep soft landscape items in my Enleiten account instead of my calendar - I just set due dates for them and they get pulled into my Next Actions list automatically 2 days before they’re due so I have some warning.
The date setting also doubles as my tickler file; I set start dates on future tasks so they don’t get into my NA list until they’re relevant.
I’m not a big calendar person, and mostly rely on my calendar sending me an SMS before meetings, so the trick of adding those “due on a given day” tasks as all-day calendar items would be awkward for me. That seems to be a preferred method for people who use their calendar a lot.
If that is getting overloaded with too many all day tasks, I know some people will create a single all day entry and list each task in the details field on their appointment.
My business partner occasionally just creates a “today” project and drags those soft landscape pieces into it during his morning inbox and task sweep to set priorities for the day.
Thanks Doreen. Superb detailed and practical first post. I appreciate you sharing your expertise on “Soft landscape”.
Regular priorities are important, to get an “altitude view”, but you cannot work only your identified high-priority items anytime, all the time.
You have to take in account also the context, the time available, the energy available.
I don’t think GTD and prioritization exclude each other.
I use the due dates as Chris mentioned with my GTD. The task moves to a next action, if not already there, on its due date giving it maximum priority. If it slips beyond the due date it is colored appropriately to scream at me all the more. What is most important to me is having my GTD with me at all times. The application I use allows me to view my entire GTD at work on my Win machine, at home on my Macs and even on my cell phone. And another app lets me call in tasks to my GTD without any writing or typing, great for those thoughts that hit me while driving. I’ve written about my experiences with GTD in a blog post at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/more-getting-things-done/ John
I agree so much with what you write… the one frustration I’ve had in the past was a high confidence level in the ‘method’ of priotitizing that I engaged.
I’m not aware of how you prioritize, but I agree in how important it is in so many areas. I just found a new product that I immediately signed up to beta test when another Director sent me this link… what a powerful, yet simple way to confidently prioritize.
http://go.catalyst.com/?linkid=8034156
Cheers,
Howard Fine
Director of IT