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Prioritization

Steps for Prioritizing Tasks

1. Capture what has our attention

• Tasks left undone are undone in the actual location of the task and in our head, consuming our energy and attention
• To avoid this, we must manage this inventory of open loops into containers that hold the items until you have time to decide on what to do
  • ex) Paper/digital note-taking devices, anything that can be of easy access
• Try to mitigate the amount of containers to have everything organized in one place, and to empty them regularly

2. Clarify what each item means and what to do about it

3. Organize the results

• The positioning of things should be relative to their importance
  • Projects are desired results that can be accomplished within a year, requiring more than one step
    • Projects don’t need to be organized, but they should be on a master list so you can review it to act appropriately. We can’t do a project, we can only do things related to it.
      • The list should solely be an index, and the steps for each action should be stored elsewhere

4. Prioritize the results

Calendars should track:

• time-specific actions (appointments)
• day-specific actions (not bound to the hour, but to the day)
• day-specific information (information handy for activities

To-do lists should track:

• Inbox, actionable, waiting for, projects list, someday/maybe, references

5. Reflect on the options

• My Weekly Reviews are a neat time to reflect
• There’s a difference between writing down that you need to buy milk vs actually doing it at the grocery store
• Reflecting allows us to step back and look at the bigger picture, gather and process everything, review our system, update things, and overall get things off our mind

6. Do Stuffs

Criterias for choosing actions:

1. Context
   • ex) Refilling prescriptions while at the grocery store
2. Time available
   • ex) Working on a paper starting at the beginning of the day
3. Energy available
   • ex) Abstract thinking earlier on in the day, organizing in the afternoon
4. Priority
   • ex) Doing homework before videography

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