Priority Management

I've spent the last 15 months thinking of, reading about, and working on "Priority Management." I thought I would share my top takeaways from this research and application.

Priority Management is the act of managing, setting, and working towards your priorities.

It is entirely different than Time Management. Time Management lets you schedule items in your day. Priority Management makes sure the items you schedule are what you should be working on to begin with. Separate these in your mind and workflows. 

The purpose of this is to (1) share my top takeaways to others who are interested and would gain from this subject, (2) to force me to refine my thoughts on the subject, and (3) to bring in some peer review.

Top Takeaways

1. There is a great & material advantage to be had by people who manage their priorities well.

The "default" position loses to the well-prioritized many times over. There is a compounding effect. An extra 10% a day is a large advantage over a quarter, a year, a...

This is a science and art worth pursuing.

2. In the "Information Age", it will never again be about just getting things done.

No one gives out awards to the person who does the most, and more importantly but harder to accept, no one cares. While this seems sobering, the good news is that there is a lot of interest and value in getting the right things done.

3. Busy, Overwhelmed, & "Prioritized Full Capacity" are three different things.

Note: these are my definitions that have been helpful to judge if I am in the right group.

Busy = constantly in motion with little reason to your actions. You do not attempt to think if what you are doing is what you should be doing.

Overwhelmed = you try hard to make sure you work on important things, but you can never "catch up." You are acting reactively, usually solving today's problems today.

Prioritized Full Capacity = though you never run out of things to do, you start each day knowing the most important thing to tackle right now. You are working proactively to solve tomorrow's problems, and you make sure you have time to think.

Work towards getting in the third group.

4. The ability to properly prioritize first requires knowledge gathering that does not feel directly tied to output.

If you are efficient, you judge yourself on pure output. If you are efficient & a student of priority, you judge yourself based on what you believe is the right output through results. Neither one of these systems would give any "value" to the initial knowledge gathering that is required to properly know what results you should care about in the first place.

Sitting in on meetings, having daily conversations with team members, asking your boss again what they view as the end result are essential daily practices of the well-prioritized worker. If you do not do this step, you can do everything else right and still miss the target.

5. The great executors prioritize the "next" thing they need to do, remove the rest from their mental backlog, and achieve it.

Then, because they have prepared themselves with the right base of knowledge to operate on, they know what to work on next from their "backlog." First things first, and one thing at a time.

6. Beware of the "productivity traps."

These are things that trick you in to working on the 80% that produce 20% of the results. Examples being:

• Always tackling the "short items" that nicely fall into the urgent & important category while letting the big item you should really be working on sit in your backlog & gain interest.
• Using unpaired metrics that only evaluate the quantity of a work item and not its quality. Number of code releases (while not counting the number of bugs/issues). New MRR (while not looking at churn). Etc.
• Ever assuming that you have all the knowledge you need to properly prioritize your tasks going forward. Knowledge accumulation is a never ending game.

Tier 1 Resources

• The 80/20 Principle - Richard Koch
• Chapter 5 "First Things First" of The Effective Executive - Peter Drucker
• Chapter 6 "Planning Today's Action for Tomorrow's Output" of High Output Management - Andy Grove
• Chapter 4 "Rule #1: Work Deeply" of Deep Work - Cal Newport (and Chapter 7)

A few quotes:

From The Effective Executive,

This is the "secret" of those people who "do so many things" and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.

From High Output Management,

Finally, remember that by saying "yes" --to projects, a course of action, or whatever--you are implicitly saying "no" to something else.