1) Make two lists. Write everything down in the first list. The second list is empty.
2) Something came up! One item on this list cannot be done. It doesn't matter why: you know which one that is. Which one is it? Write that down in the second list and mark it off the first list.
3) Repeat until the first list is done.
Congratulations, your second list is prioritized (albeit likely in reverse order), without extraneous algebraic diversions.
Bonus points for going Warren Buffett on it: only the top 3 priorities matter, sideline everything else; consider repeating the exercise after those three are complete.
Thanks for this. It's interesting because it's super close to another method: Write down everything, put the most important thing at the top of a list, next important next, go till done. That's maybe the most naive method possible and essentially shouldn't count as advice for "how to prioritize".
But, maybe the fact that you're going from least to most important makes it materially easier. It's functionally different because you're picking out the least important stuff when the list of unchosen items is big and the most important stuff when the list is small. I can see how this would help a lot.
“put the most important thing at the top of a list, next important next” you realize you’re basically saying “the trick to prioritizing is you have to prioritize” right? The idea behind all of these systems is to help people figure out what is actually important.
Approaching it from "least to most" circumvents the problem of rationalizing and justifying. We get caught up in that when we're looking for "most important" or "what to do", but we already know what's got to come off the bottom of the list, without even having to explain it.
It also helps mitigate our fear avoidance strategies (ex: (a|b|c) - (x|y|z) + (w|t|f), Einsenhower quadrants, and so on) because there's just no room for it. Something has to go. What? Okay. Next.
This is genius! It's like getting the benefits of procrastination without actually procrastinating.
This seems to me that this would work best for deciding what to do within a fixed timeframe. How can this be adapted for things of varying time frames? Certain things don't need to be done today on any given day, but if months go by and i haven't done them, it's bad.
I like this idea, but isn’t this a recipe for only ever doing the urgent stuff, not the not-urgent-but-important stuff? For example, if your list had “read 1 chapter of SICP” on it, you might never get to it.
Most tasks on most task lists are not tasks - they are wishes or outcomes
Prioritising outcomes is easy. Do we get five new corporate customers this month or do we build a web scaling system on AWS.
One is a task, one is an unknown project with no clear definitions or starting process. Which is why many startups have great infrastructure and not enough customers.
So, unless you know which right people to put in a room, the thing in front of you is not a task it's an investigation.
And to me this answers the question a few days back about sam altmann - determination is what gets you from "get five customers" to "call bob smith of company X after Joe Schmoe introduces us and offer him a 12 month for price of 6 deal if they sign this week"
Determination is of course made easier with contacts but politicians will politician
> One is a task, one is an unknown project with no clear definitions or starting process. Which is why many startups have great infrastructure and not enough customers.
It's interesting that I worked with a company that had a strong sales department but a weak (or non existent?) IT department. Getting five new corporate customers was a task for them. But setting up an AWS EC2 instance with an RDS server? That was an investigation that is requiring a trip to Singapore.
Instead of maximizing “benefit - cost” I would recommend maximizing “cost/benefit”.
The former will bias towards big tasks with big payoffs, but often there are small tasks with extremely good ROI, which will get lost if you just look at the magnitude of the net benefit.
But, +1 to the general approach of trying to put a number on it. Remember though, your numbers are uncertain, beware the McNamara fallacy.
I've found it more useful to focus on "How to deprioritize tasks?" There, it's helpful to have a good understanding of the operative principles and values. All sorts of possible to-do items come up that only kinda sorta express those values. Those are the enemy. You have to get good at the logic of necessity and sufficiency to recognize which ones you can ignore entirely.
> Sorting a “Big List” of epics doesn’t seem like the right way .. The first problem is that you’re sorting things that are incomparable .. The second problem is that the resulting decision is unsatisfying to [all] stakeholders .. The third problem is that The Big List conflates the idea of “prioritization”—what is most important—with “work-planning”—which is the order that specific work will be executed ... The solution is to prioritize items in separate, actually-comparable streams ... Don't forget to schedule rocks, then pebbles, then sand. That’s an even more primary principle for work-planning. Separate prioritization streams help identify which rocks and pebbles should be scheduled in the first place.
Do people really have this hard of a time deciding what task to do? If you have something that needs doing urgently, then do that. Otherwise... it just depends? There's no one-size-fits-all solution.
It is a very complex function which takes into account all your previous experiences, your value system and your estimations regarding the future.
Good news though! Your brain already computed it, and presents you the answer in the form of "I want to do that thing right now".
Quick debug sheet:
- my brain in wrong, what I want is not what I should - are you sure? Figure out your narration. If you ever have been excited about some project you know how well your "want" will align with your "should". You may be stuck in some story about yourself which you haven't updated.
- I want it all! Yeah you are really still just looking, if you are not sure what you want, that's not really a problem. It's fine to not want anything in particular. If you keep telling yourself you really want it all just choose at random, and then when you "have time" slowly and patiently explain yourself that your time is finite, and amount of ideas you can come up with, not necessarily.
I suggest also trusting yourself with this. Worst case scenario you spend some time doing the thing you wanted to do and observing that will be a valuable data point (automatically integrated) into your future "I want to".
edit: I answered it in the context of personal lists, startups have much simpler optimization function
It's a nice idea, but I'd like to see some examples of this in practice. One problem I see with this particular system is one of relative scale, in that your x,y,z and a,b,c and p,q,r triples all need to be somewhat-carefully tuned to remain on the same numerical order of magnitude. I wonder if a better system can be constructed that depends more on the relative rankings within each category, and less on absolute quantities.
That said, I've started using another system that a coworker recently introduced me to. He likes to model the total business value of an improvement or cost-savings as a discounted cash flow. You estimate the gain as a cash flow per period, and run that through the standard present-value formulas, either picking a discount rate out of a hat or using a range of discount rates to see how the results vary. You can then compare this to your total estimated cost (e.g. your hourly rate times the expected hours of work) to see if the thing is worth doing.
For me, I think of projects as sort of having two phases: the discovery phase and the "get it over the finish line" phase.
In the first phase, there are a ton of unknowns. You don't know what all the technical challenges are, so it's difficult to even estimate how long the project will take. As such, I think it's more important to take on tasks that have the most number of unknowns. Your goal here is to unearth any "unknown unknowns". You end up prototyping a lot at this stage to prove out ideas, and the work here will naturally generate even more tasks for you, but that's a good thing as it's better to find that out now rather than later, when you think "you're almost done" and then have to push out the schedule a ton because you find some technical limitation that would sidetrack your entire project.
Eventually, once you get through this "discovery" phase, you get to a phase where you generally know the big pieces and have a way better idea of what the big technical challenges are.
You now have a long list of tasks and how long it would take if you did absolutely everything. You won't do everything though since you don't have all the time in the world. Now you enter the "get it over the finish line" phase. I think at this point you just draw a line in the sand and say "we ship on this date" based on what you think you can ship for your MVP and given the list of tasks. You prioritize things would prevent you from getting across the finish line.
This is a pretty coarse way of looking at things, for sure, and there is a middle phase in there where you just execute through tasks based on lighting up features or demo'ing progress to stakeholders, but I think looking at it as "discovering" and "finishing" is a simpler way to ensure you're not just spinning your wheels doing tasks just because they're there.
Yeah, that's the way I look at. You de-risk a project by front-loading “investigate open questions about ___,” and then getting to the stuff that’s obviously just work that’s doable.
Readit News
1) Make two lists. Write everything down in the first list. The second list is empty.
2) Something came up! One item on this list cannot be done. It doesn't matter why: you know which one that is. Which one is it? Write that down in the second list and mark it off the first list.
3) Repeat until the first list is done.
Congratulations, your second list is prioritized (albeit likely in reverse order), without extraneous algebraic diversions.
Bonus points for going Warren Buffett on it: only the top 3 priorities matter, sideline everything else; consider repeating the exercise after those three are complete.
But, maybe the fact that you're going from least to most important makes it materially easier. It's functionally different because you're picking out the least important stuff when the list of unchosen items is big and the most important stuff when the list is small. I can see how this would help a lot.
It also helps mitigate our fear avoidance strategies (ex: (a|b|c) - (x|y|z) + (w|t|f), Einsenhower quadrants, and so on) because there's just no room for it. Something has to go. What? Okay. Next.
This seems to me that this would work best for deciding what to do within a fixed timeframe. How can this be adapted for things of varying time frames? Certain things don't need to be done today on any given day, but if months go by and i haven't done them, it's bad.
Most tasks on most task lists are not tasks - they are wishes or outcomes
Prioritising outcomes is easy. Do we get five new corporate customers this month or do we build a web scaling system on AWS.
One is a task, one is an unknown project with no clear definitions or starting process. Which is why many startups have great infrastructure and not enough customers.
So, unless you know which right people to put in a room, the thing in front of you is not a task it's an investigation.
And to me this answers the question a few days back about sam altmann - determination is what gets you from "get five customers" to "call bob smith of company X after Joe Schmoe introduces us and offer him a 12 month for price of 6 deal if they sign this week"
Determination is of course made easier with contacts but politicians will politician
It's interesting that I worked with a company that had a strong sales department but a weak (or non existent?) IT department. Getting five new corporate customers was a task for them. But setting up an AWS EC2 instance with an RDS server? That was an investigation that is requiring a trip to Singapore.
The former will bias towards big tasks with big payoffs, but often there are small tasks with extremely good ROI, which will get lost if you just look at the magnitude of the net benefit.
But, +1 to the general approach of trying to put a number on it. Remember though, your numbers are uncertain, beware the McNamara fallacy.
> Sorting a “Big List” of epics doesn’t seem like the right way .. The first problem is that you’re sorting things that are incomparable .. The second problem is that the resulting decision is unsatisfying to [all] stakeholders .. The third problem is that The Big List conflates the idea of “prioritization”—what is most important—with “work-planning”—which is the order that specific work will be executed ... The solution is to prioritize items in separate, actually-comparable streams ... Don't forget to schedule rocks, then pebbles, then sand. That’s an even more primary principle for work-planning. Separate prioritization streams help identify which rocks and pebbles should be scheduled in the first place.
One thing I realised is, startups should spend more time optimising the decision of their top priority, and less time optimising efficiency.
There's no point working on the wrong thing with 100% efficiency.
Good news though! Your brain already computed it, and presents you the answer in the form of "I want to do that thing right now".
Quick debug sheet:
- my brain in wrong, what I want is not what I should - are you sure? Figure out your narration. If you ever have been excited about some project you know how well your "want" will align with your "should". You may be stuck in some story about yourself which you haven't updated.
- I want it all! Yeah you are really still just looking, if you are not sure what you want, that's not really a problem. It's fine to not want anything in particular. If you keep telling yourself you really want it all just choose at random, and then when you "have time" slowly and patiently explain yourself that your time is finite, and amount of ideas you can come up with, not necessarily.
I suggest also trusting yourself with this. Worst case scenario you spend some time doing the thing you wanted to do and observing that will be a valuable data point (automatically integrated) into your future "I want to".
edit: I answered it in the context of personal lists, startups have much simpler optimization function
That said, I've started using another system that a coworker recently introduced me to. He likes to model the total business value of an improvement or cost-savings as a discounted cash flow. You estimate the gain as a cash flow per period, and run that through the standard present-value formulas, either picking a discount rate out of a hat or using a range of discount rates to see how the results vary. You can then compare this to your total estimated cost (e.g. your hourly rate times the expected hours of work) to see if the thing is worth doing.
In the first phase, there are a ton of unknowns. You don't know what all the technical challenges are, so it's difficult to even estimate how long the project will take. As such, I think it's more important to take on tasks that have the most number of unknowns. Your goal here is to unearth any "unknown unknowns". You end up prototyping a lot at this stage to prove out ideas, and the work here will naturally generate even more tasks for you, but that's a good thing as it's better to find that out now rather than later, when you think "you're almost done" and then have to push out the schedule a ton because you find some technical limitation that would sidetrack your entire project.
Eventually, once you get through this "discovery" phase, you get to a phase where you generally know the big pieces and have a way better idea of what the big technical challenges are.
You now have a long list of tasks and how long it would take if you did absolutely everything. You won't do everything though since you don't have all the time in the world. Now you enter the "get it over the finish line" phase. I think at this point you just draw a line in the sand and say "we ship on this date" based on what you think you can ship for your MVP and given the list of tasks. You prioritize things would prevent you from getting across the finish line.
This is a pretty coarse way of looking at things, for sure, and there is a middle phase in there where you just execute through tasks based on lighting up features or demo'ing progress to stakeholders, but I think looking at it as "discovering" and "finishing" is a simpler way to ensure you're not just spinning your wheels doing tasks just because they're there.
https://basecamp.com/shapeup/3.4-chapter-13#work-is-like-a-h...