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Comment by ergonaught | Hacker News Reader

How to Prioritize Anything:

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.

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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.

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.

“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.

The link suggests replacing your intuition with how important a task is with your intuition about 3 different aspects of the task. Which has a similar problem.

The real trick to prioritization is to have enough capacity.

Capacity informs how well/fast you can execute through your priorities, which can sometimes mean that you should reprioritize according to your available throughput (“Capacity says we’ll have this 10th thing next year, we need it this year, let’s reprioritize). But unless you have specific time horizons for your wants/needs, capacity and priorities aren’t as related as most people think.

You should prioritize the things that will have the highest impact to your customers or your business. That could be:

- a mission critical infrastructure change - a small bug that is driving people nuts - a differentiating new feature - a whole new product that will take a long time to build

Good prioritization facts in multiple criteria. Bad (most common) prioritization is a function of loudest voices yelling.

> you realize you’re basically saying “the trick to prioritizing is you have to prioritize” right?

I'm very aware of it. The next sentence I wrote:

> That's maybe the most naive method possible and essentially shouldn't count as advice for "how to prioritize".

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.

It’s not prioritization if it doesn’t hurt.

That sounds more like you need free time where you are not "working on tasks".

I'd like to read more about this. Are there any additional resources on this prioritization method?

"Find additional resources about this prioritization method" should definitely go at the the very top of the second list.

Haha nice

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