Prioritise the Highest Order Bit

And scroll down an inch to see illustrations using actual binary bits.

I think the drill bits are just a humorous pic.

And I think the article makes sense. It discusses prioritizing coherently which often means de-prioritizing many important things.

i disagree, it isn't gobbledygook. it's not necessarily a great analogy but the underlying idea that the analogy is trying to help you remember and communicate is a reasonable and useful one:

> When evaluating past decisions or thinking about making new ones, a useful analogy to use is the flipping of the highest-order bit.

> aim to identify and flip the highest order bit because if you don't, you're not going to be able to make up for it by flipping everything else.

Other ways of trying to remember and communicate a similar idea could the "80 / 20 rule" -- e.g. small subset of effort/population/whatever often contributes disproportionately to some output.

Theory of Constraints / Eli Goldratt's book "The Goal" is another bunch of related concepts. Decide on what your big picture objective is, investigate and analyse the system to discover what the main bottleneck is. Focus on removing that bottleneck.