Prioritize Prioritizing

Let’s get this done.

Correctly prioritizing tasks can be difficult on-the-ground and in-the-moment. I’ve developed a little rubric that I find really helpful. When I bother to use it, that is.

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I am aware that I’m behind in my publishing.

Ars Pandemonium is a hungry maw, and there’s only me to feed it. I’ve got a number of pieces almost — but not quite — ready to go. See, I have a lot of different things going on at the moment, and I’ve been struggling a little with prioritization.

And that, friends, is absurd. Analyzing, establishing, and managing priorities is one of the things I’m best at. Or at least, it long has been. Maybe I’ve lost my touch. Possible!

But more likely is that, once again, I’m just a bad manager of my team-of-one, or a bad team to me-the-manager. I’ve covered this ground before. I know how to prioritize. But when it comes to my solo work, I just kinda…don’t do it.

So, as a little butt-kicker to myself, I thought maybe I’d write a quick piece about exactly this.

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There are probably as many ways to analyze and set priorities as there are people who analyze and set priorities. We have to be honest here: a lot of this work is done by feel. Irrespective of tools and processes, it’s an enterprise refined by experience (read: failure). Lay your hand on the hot stove of poor prioritization enough times and even the densest of us eventually learns a thing or two.

Still, over the years I’ve developed a basic rubric, a conceptual model, that I find helpful for myself and that has worked well for my teams. It may seem a bit simplistic…but, hey, sometimes simple is best. And being lightweight and quick-to-model is the point. Let’s take a look.

Fit for purpose.

First, some parameters. This tool isn’t for setting “life priorities.” It’s not a value analysis or anything like that.

Nor is it necessarily useful for more complex strategic priority analysis at something like the “business imperative” level. That doesn't yield particularly well to this lightweight approach.

For example, we might be considering whether we prioritize shipping this project on time, or prioritize shipping at the highest possible quality. Maybe the market for this project just isn’t that time-sensitive, so it’s worth it to do one more polish pass. Or, maybe there’s an extremely narrow calendar window that simply must be hit and if some part isn’t quite up to snuff, well, we’ll get ‘em with v2.0.

Volumes could be (and have been!) written about setting these sorts of high-level priorities. And obviously they can be make-or-break in many cases. However, in my experience, they don’t actually come up all that frequently, and they often offer enough time to think them through using more nuanced models.

That doesn’t make these kinds of priorities any easier to establish, but it does mean they have a different character to the kind of immediate, on-the-ground, tactical, task prioritization I’ve been thinking about recently, and that I developed this rubric to address.

What should I work on right now? What am I working on today, this week, this month?¹ And what’s going to have to wait?

We’re all making these kinds of decisions all the time. Usually instantaneously, and at least for experienced folks, usually pretty correctly. But as with anything, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing intentionally. Our intuition may be our most trusted ally…but sometimes it’s kind of a doofus, and it’s a good idea to crosscheck just a little more formally.

Meet the Quadratron. (Not really. I just made that up.)

At a high level, I tend to think of task priorities being assessed along the interaction of two dimensions — importance and urgency. How much does this thing really matter, and how forgiving is the timeline?

We can picture this on a graph defining four quadrants, where we’ll make urgency increase from low to high on the x-axis, and importance increase from low to high on the y-axis. Like this:

Using this layout, we can immediately see that two of the quadrants are easier to triage than the other two. If something is of high importance and high urgency, hop to! That’s on fire! That’s critical work that has to be done now!

Conversely, if something is of low importance and low urgency, well…I guess if you just don’t have anything else to do…

The other two are a little more nuanced. Tasks that are of lower importance but high urgency can feel good to get done. Check some things off! They won’t matter that much, but hey, they’ve got to get done now if they’re ever going to get done, so may as well plow through. Right?

Sure, there may be some opportunistic wins there — if a task is of zero importance, it shouldn’t be on the graph at all. So there will be some reward to be had. And it’s fair enough that feeling good about progress has some value in and of itself.

But allowing ourselves to respond only to the level of urgency without rationally analyzing the importance means we’ll spend a lot of our resources (time, money, mental energy, whatever) on stuff that just won’t add up to substantive impact.

And that leaves us with the most abstruse of all: tasks that are highly important but are not particularly urgent. The lack of urgency may stem from a distant time horizon for the work, or perhaps that it’s an internally-driven goal that hasn’t been widely announced. Maybe it’s an editorial calendar that you just made the hell up. Lots of different reasons might contribute to the urgency level.

This is where this kind of analysis really pays off. Carving out time to work on these when it seems like there are so many other things on fire right now can be really difficult. No one is pounding down your door to make sure they get done. But you can see on the graph that importance dictates investing in this work, even when it doesn’t seem like it’s burning a hole through your kanban.

Sometimes it can feel a little like playing chess, where you’ll make a move whose only purpose is to set up some later, more critical move. You really want to jump directly to the thing that feels more urgent! But you know that correctly analyzing the interplay between importance and urgency is critical to making the right move.

Simple can work.

Again, this seems terribly simple. But when you start to put various tasks on the graph, start to really think through both dimensions, I’ll bet some trends emerge. They usually do for me.²

In general, the tool doesn’t show you anything you don’t already know at some level. But the very act of performing the exercise can be quite revealing.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that you have to prioritize the task of setting priorities.³ Which is just…ugh. Worth it.

Have any tools or approaches to prioritization that work particularly well for you? Share in the comments!

1. For the sake of scheduling (and prioritizing) I almost never quantize more finely than to half-day resolution. In the real world, absolutely nothing takes less than a half-day. Fight me.

2. For me this usually looks like over-indexing on low-importance, high-urgency tasks because it feels good to calm everyone down and get those off my plate even at the unintended expense of starving high-importance, low-urgency tasks for resources. I am kinda predictable.

3. No, I don’t suppose this is truly a correct use of the word “irony,” but cope.