I’ve been asking myself what priority really is.

My world: never-ending to-do lists.

I’m never finished. There’s always more to do. I could always work 18 hours overtime and have more stuff to do.

Work doesn’t end. Work is only ever cut and skipped and down-prioritized until it never gets done.

The very nature of product development is that only the “high-priority” work gets done. We ship when we’re “done” as in “we got enough high-priority items done that we’re satisfied, but a lot of things are still on our list but don’t mind those.” I don’t think you could reasonably do it any other way unless you spend infinite time on something.

I imagine it’s the same for a lot of people.

But if you do get to finish all your work now and then, and just want to do them in the best order, you might look at things differently than me.

What Confuses Me

So what is “priority”?

Is it “urgency”? Is it “importance”?

What is “importance”?

Sometimes urgent and important is the same thing but deceivingly often it’s not. This is the realm of Eisenhower’s Matrix.

So how to handle this well confuses me and has made prioritizing work and doing things in the right order hard.

Or to put it differently: it makes it hard to push and cut the less important things and only do the “high priority” items. As always in software, there’s no end anyway, so that’s all we can do. Push till later and cut off our lists.

A Method That’s Helped Me Recently

So I started asking myself what priority is when urgency and importance are different.

Could I get rid of urgency and just think about importance?

Let’s say I have a deadline tomorrow that’s super important and then it’s moved till Friday next week. It’s still just as important, just not as urgent. Things would be just as bad now as before if the tasks didn’t get done before the deadline. I would feel just as bad and any other consequences would be just as bad. I just have some more time now that the deadline moved.

To handle this, I arrived at “How bummed out would I be if this never got done?"

This question immediately makes priority easier. “Buy my own house” becomes a very high priority and so does “learn to play guitar” and “go for a run” despite none being urgent. At any point in time, I could always do them tomorrow but it’d suck if I never did them.

At the same time, obviously high priority items such as “help the customer ship their product” stay a high priority.

Low-priority items get exposed too. “Organize emails into folders” or “answer cold-outreach email I don’t care about” both now obviously aren’t important. I simply wouldn’t regret them on my deathbed if they never got done.

Stuff in between ends up with in-between priority too. Forgetting to “buy ground coffee” won’t destroy me, but it would definitely not be very nice at all if I were out of coffee for even a few days. So that ends up a medium priority.

Bummed Out is the Guide

So that’s it. “How bummed out would I be if this never got done?” is my new guide.

I’m liking it so far and it’s made things easier.

How do you prioritize?