3 Surprisingly Simple Tricks for Prioritizing What’s Actually Important.

BY CHRIS DANILO — First appeared on my personal blog

Chris Danilo

Aug 24, 2015

BY CHRIS DANILO — First appeared on my personal blog

You’re setting up your to-do list for the day.

Tasks 1, 2, and 3. You seem to have an idea of what’s next and then suddenly your boss comes in your door:

“Hey the deadline changed overnight, so we need to ship by Thursday but we also need to get everything else done.”

What is he talking about? Why did the deadline shift? How are we going to handle this new workload all of a sudden?

This is clearly an urgent problem and that means we NEED to get it done.

Rule 1: Urgency does not mean priority

Urgency asks when you need to get something done. Priority asks whether you should do it at all.

Here’s an example:

You’re leading a team that is building a new wristwatch. You’re building the most durable, long lasting, toughest wristwatch because that’s the market you understand best, with whom you have the most clout, and for whom you’ve already built the supply chain. Let’s just say you’ve already made pre-sales, and all you need to do is build and ship the damn thing.

But then, two weeks before the ship date, your product engineer comes to you and says the shipment of platinum is going to cost twice as much if we want it to arrive on time. We can still build the watch with aluminum, though, and that would keep us on timeline and on budget.

You, being an insightful, brilliant, (and profoundly attractive) manager, ask “but what will the consequence be of using aluminum in all of the watches?”

He says: “well, they’ll be a lot less durable.”

Well, holy shit. The whole reason we built the damn watch was to make it durable. It doesn’t matter if we ship late or have to raise the price; we’re not building aluminum watches.

The priority was to make a durable product for the customers we understood, not to build a product for SOMEONE by our arbitrary deadline.

Even though it seems urgent, it’s not important.

Rule 2: Alignment means independent decision-making

It’s hard to manage a team of people who are all making decisions on a project. You don’t always want to micromanage, because it creates a management bottleneck.

If you haven’t had this experience, you will.

It happened to me in my first management job, and it happens to every new manager in the world. You realize that you need more hands-on-deck, so you hire people (usually interns). All of a sudden, you realize that you’re doing MORE work to get your interns on track than you are with the work you SHOULD be doing.

They’re all coming to you saying: “What should I do next?” “Is this good enough?” “Can I come in late on Friday?”

Now YOU’RE accommodating THEM.

So how do you get them to make their own decisions?

Start with the “Why?” Talk about why you’re doing this work, or WHY you’re building this watch.

This watch is designed to save the life of an airplane pilot whose plane crashes. The battery charges with solar power through the faceplate, it withstand pressure equal to a hurricane on Venus, and it will keep the same minute in a vat of liquid hot magma as if it were at room temperature in grand central station.

Whatever your story is, tell it, and align your team with the PRIORITIES that will be needed to achieve this.

Be crystal clear about it by using spectra.

Line up every priority you might have on it’s own spectrum and run through the list with your team. Literally circle the end of the spectrum you’ll prioritize:

Fast ||||||||||||||||||||||||| Slow

Cheap ||||||||||||||||| Durable

Safe ||||||||||||||||||| Risky

Exclusive |||||||||||||||||| Public

Etcetera.

Getting your team in alignment with the mission of the project and the priorities it holds will allow them to make the best decisions. Hiring good decision makers in the first place, well, that’s up to you.

Pro tip: Alignment is NOT the same as agreement. Comment if you’d like to see more detail about the difference between agreement and alignment.

Rule 3: Your brain. Use it.

It’s your best resource.

Without it, all things fail. Yet we constantly neglect this little 3 pound wad of cells that magically has the power to ponder the infiniteness of the universe, and bafflingly, itself.

So feed it! Make sure it’s running properly!

Are you getting sleep? Nutrition? Social interaction?

Of course, by ‘your brain,’ I really mean your gut. (They’re biologically connected, by the way.) If you REALLY don’t think you have a gut feeling about what you should be focusing on, try asking yourself these questions:

“What am I doing to avoid the hard stuff?”

“Am I being productive, or just active?”

“What will happen if I don’t do this?”

Being honest with yourself about these questions will help you look at REALITY and stop blinding yourself with task-minutiae.

Here’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the most important psychological guide you can use to help you prioritize how to balance work and life, career and family, or sleep and sex.

If you’re not living by this pyramid, you’re seriously screwing yourself.

You might find that you really need to break for lunch, simply because you won’t be able to focus and work at the level of quality your job requires if you try to persevere.

I usually get a solid headache around 1pm-3pm on most days. Instead of looking at a computer screen, I try to schedule meetings during this time, since I know they keep me more engaged.

It’s totally normal, but many of us continue to lie to ourselves about our mental state— only to find, 2 days later, that slightly loopy email we wrote to our boss after a 16 hour day of Clif bars and Redbull.