Common Advice is Flawed

My idea for this week was to write “10 Useful Prioritization Frameworks.” 🎉 

But the reality is that there aren’t 10.

Don’t get me wrong. There are like 1000 things called that. But most prioritization advice suffers from one or more of the following flaws:

• Overly simplistic — but with something that makes it sound academic

• Too complicated — but with a name that makes it sound simple

• Tactical — when your problem is strategic

• Impractical — for instance if you don’t completely control your schedule

Prioritization is about ROI, return on investment. So most frameworks are heuristics for determining relative ROI.

And this is one reason we struggle. Let’s take an example:

Question: How should Mordecai figure out what the ROI is of each of these?

• Numbers: Sure, we can get rough numbers for some things. But estimates will vary in our level of certainty and/or their distribution of outcomes. The ROI of other items is simply unknowable.

• Risk: How can we determine the downside of Mordecai not engaging on an issue?

• Evolution: How will each item change over time?

• Interconnection: Does our action/inaction on any given item change the ROI profile of others?

• Cost (reward) of delay: Let’s say Mordecai can address every item in just two weeks. But sequencing implies delay of some tasks. Will the ROI be the same regardless of delay? Of course not! Moreover, some outcome projections will actually improve if we exercise patience.

• Team: A lot depends on how much Mordecai can delegate, which depends on who is in the seat(s). For instance, most mature companies can handle a factory fire without the CEO’s involvement.

• Symbolism: People pay attention to what the leader does and infer meaning from that. Factory personnel might be glad to know that the CEO is interested in resolution of the fire, even if he’s superfluous. They might be resentful if he’s visibly absent from the ongoing discussion. Meanwhile, one can reach varying conclusions about Mordecai attending or missing the monthly metrics meeting.

• Player: Let’s not forget Mordecai! How high is his energy right now? What is he interested in? What is he ridiculously good at vs. his people? What’s the cost of breaking a habit to address another priority?

No one can do all of the necessary calculations to stack-rank everything.

The reality is that almost everyone is faking it.

Very few people have a great system for prioritizing.

Worse, I’d wager that negative emotions are the driving force behind most people’s Z
prioritization.

Approaches

So what should we do?

1. Embrace structure: Humans need it. Having routine schedules for routine buckets of tasks aids productivity — because it reduces cognitive load.

2. Respect “The One Thing”: Author Gary Keller’s advice in The One Thing is simple yet effective. Choose the single thing that can make everything else easier in moving toward your goals. You can apply that long-term and then work backward to today.

3. Say “no” (mostly to yourself): Stop doing everything that doesn’t matter. This is easy to know and hard to do, because it requires saying “no” to others and to the voices in your own head.

4. (Lightly) Eisenhower it: The Eisenhower matrix is a 2×2 matrix of Importance vs. Urgency. It is still useful — but only to a point. After all, once you have 5 things in the Urgent-and-Important box, how do you choose then?

5. Eat the frog: Get the hard thing(s) done first each day. Our willpower and energy are highest then. Completing hard things early creates momentum for the rest of the day.

6. Balance large and small: As much as we dislike it, there are many small things that need to get done (even if you’re CEO). Set time to complete the small. (This includes time to learn and time to think.)

7. Balance current and future: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clay Christensen is all about the trap of optimizing current offerings and not developing new ones. You need to block time to innovate.

8. Push it down: No, not into your dark soul, silly. Push down prioritization as far down the org chart as you can. This means entrusting your team with explicit responsibilities and relying on them to escalate when they need help.

9. Create (some) options: Some tasks may be hard to justify as “important” but could create opportunities, which could not have been foreseen.

On this last point: Most people are biased toward working backward from clear objectives, This seems obvious, yet there’s an alternative.

It’s what I call “organic strategy.” You create a ruckus, see what happens, and then act.

Author Lawrence Freedman calls this “Type II strategy.” It’s especially useful in greenfield situations.

Conclusion: Two rules of thumb

1. The best method is the one you use religiously (like diets).

2. You should probably combine two or more methods.

   
   

Coda

1/ We could write a whole article about prioritization for teams, especially tech teams.

People have written books about it, but that’s silly. Most of this boils down to ROI as well.

2/ Two other famous frameworks not mentioned above are ABCDE and MoSCoW. These are just fancy names for “rank your tasks.”

Another one is “MIT”: Most Important Task. This is nearly identical to the idea of The One Thing.

Outro 

“Life doesn’t need a soundtrack. Life is a soundtrack.”
—Sri

Speaking of problems and opportunities, we may add another word with P just so we can popularize the “OPP framework.” (Speaking to my Gen Xers rn.)

Cheers

Find me at thewarriorpoet.com and on LinkedIn.

Get unstuck, and crush it. Double period.