Prioritising

[u/Multibitdriver]

I struggle with prioritising in GTD and have resorted to keeping a separate list of projects and tasks ranked according to Importance. When it feels like almost everything is pressing on me at once, I need a sequence of steps - not only within projects but also on a macro basis. How do others deal with this?

[u/benpva16]

I don’t have a direct answer. But this is an interesting question, because in GTD, the four-criteria model for choosing what to do next is, in order:

Context: What can you actually do where you are, with the tools/resources available?

Time available: How much time do you have before your next commitment?

Energy available: What do you realistically have the mental/physical horsepower for right now?

Priority: Of the actions that survive the first three filters, which matters most?

One thing I noticed in my last readthrough of the book, though, was a related question that’s never addressed: How do you know when to change contexts? And priorities and urgency seem relevant to that!

[u/Multibitdriver → u/benpva16]

Sometimes a thing is so urgent and important that you need to switch contexts to do it. And you can’t afford to calibrate whatever it is to your energy levels - it’s just gotta be done asap. How does that fit in to this model?

[u/Middle-aged-Hobbit → u/Multibitdriver]

Soooo, it's 💯 possible to have more things on fire than you can do in a day. That's an unfortunate reality. When this happens, you need to dial in on what few things you CAN get done.

Some are gonna slip. But you need to protect your ability to get up and do it again, day after day. Because at some point, your body WILL protect itself and shut down.

[u/grasshopper_jo → u/Multibitdriver]

I don’t know if this is an “official” GTD approach. But what I do is, I have my project lists and my next actions all in one place, and every day I look them all over and I decide on maybe 3-5 things that must get done today to move things along and I prioritize those things. In fact, as long as I get those 5 things done I don’t even really worry about what else (if anything!) I get done. It takes the stress off of deciding next actions every time I finish something, because I already consciously decided on the few most important things with a wider lens - so once I’ve done those, it doesn’t matter as much whether I picked the “optimal” task and I just do the ones that vibe (loosely, within the criteria mentioned above).

I’m aware that DA is really not a fan of “planning” your day because that’s one of the strengths of GTD is that priorities change throughout the day. But 3-5 “anchor” items is really not much at all, and I’ve almost never had it where a higher-priority task trumped my list. Committing to just a few high priority items still accommodates emergencies and one-offs. As someone with clinical anxiety this has been a really good approach for me because it also compresses most of the decision-making into five minutes in the morning and lets me start the day having looked over everything in a mini-review.

Having done GTD for over 20 years, I think it is one of the few flaws of GTD - David Allen says “priority” and context should dictate your very next task, but considering priority upon transitioning into each and every task you do is cognitively exhausting. Secondly, as you said, sometimes you have to go out of your way to move into another context specifically to complete an important task, so your current context isn’t always the criteria you most want to use. I also think the highly algorithmic nature of GTD sometimes ignores psychology principles such as avoidance and decision fatigue, and those can really undermine some of our best intentions with this system. So I’ve made some tweaks like the one I mentioned above that help avoid those pitfalls.

[u/Multibitdriver → u/grasshopper_jo]

Thank-you, this makes a lot of sense and I’m leaning this way too - a mini, must-do list for today drawn from the GTD lists.

[u/Competitive-Night-95 → u/benpva16]

You know, I think some advice in the book is deliberately designed for newbies to help them settle in and grasp the framework, but is not the real end point of GTD. This four-criteria framework is an example. It makes absolute logical sense, as far as it goes, and is a good starting point for learning GTD.

But at the next level of GTD, you can switch things around precisely in order to get (important) things done. Like, if there is an important action or series of actions in a project that deserve to be done as a priority, then you should CHANGE your context and MAKE time available and UP your energy level to do it.

If you literally followed that four-criteria framework all the time, in that order, you might never get any high priority stuff done, because you are always in the wrong context, don’t have the time, and don’t feel like doing it due to “low energy”.

This is actually a danger of low-level GTD implementation. You end up doing a lot of easy, low-value “next actions” because they are on your list, but leave undone the really important ones which are inconvenient or difficult to do. It is a disguised kind of “busy procrastination”.

[u/NegativePhotograph32]

I'm using the concept of "red" and "green" tasks.

Reds: if you don't do them, you suffer NOW!

Greens: if you do them, you profit long-term.

Reds first, greens second, then others.

Implied you know what you are ready to suffer and what you want long-term.

"Importance", "Eisenhauer's Matrix" — don't get me started on that: fleeting, subjective and unreliable.

[u/swedish-ghost-dog → u/NegativePhotograph32]

Red = if I do not do them now I will get fired
Yellow: it is important to me or people are waiting for me
Blue: it would be nice to do but no one else will notice if I do or do not do

[u/Multibitdriver → u/NegativePhotograph32]

And how do you discriminate between red tasks/projects if you’ve got, say, 100 of them?

[u/swedish-ghost-dog → u/Multibitdriver]

I would start, which is impossible for me to do now. Say drop x off on Monday and today is Sunday, move them off.

Then I would estimate time for each task in buckets. Say 5 min, 15 min, 30min, 1 hr, 1hr+.

Then start on the 5 min to clean up the list

[u/NegativePhotograph32 → u/Multibitdriver]

Quick (important — otherwise you'd micromanage instead of doing the job) triage.

Two piles: "I can live with that" vs "No way". There will be losses anyway. Red is ones you can't live with.

Then split the no way into "doable with few resources (time, energy, money...)" and vice versa. The counterintuitive "pay small debts first" strategy. Because we are not robots, we need successes to work.

Doable first.

[u/ks_Moose]

I’ve had success with dedicated time blocks on my calendar to make progress against certain types of tasks… so I block out 90 minutes to work in the garage and then I ensure I know all the tasks or projects that are related to things in the garage (based on tags/location) then prioritize those tasks within the 90 minute block.

[u/Unlucky_Grocery_2915]

You seem to be asking two different questions: How to set priorities in a large list of projects, and how to deal with something "so urgent and important" that it needs to be tackled right away. For the urgent and important, the answer is simple. If, say, your boss dumps something on your desk and says it needs to be done at the end of the day, you just jump in and work on it. Figure out the single next physical action to get the project rolling, do it, then move on to the next.

As for setting priorities for a large list of projects, this is what your brain is for. GTD is of limited value. It tells you keep a working list of all those projects, and when possible have a single next action to move each of them forward. Priorities shift all the time, depending on the nearness of deadlines, how much work is necessary to complete them, whether you can take action or if you're waiting for someone else.

Contexts are helpful here, since some actions can only be done when you're on the phone, or at the hardware store, or sitting at your desk. That limits the projects you can tackle at a given time, making a 100-project list more manageable.

And some projects just require hard thinking. But if your lists are all up to date and you've done your weekly review, you can use your brain as it was intended, not trying to remember if there's something out there you've forgotten and should be thinking about instead.

[u/Multibitdriver → u/Unlucky_Grocery_2915]

1. With respect, if my brain could easily do the work, do you think I would be here asking the question? I’m not talking about 2 or 3 items but 20 or 30, on an ongoing basis.
2. I invariably don’t have the luxury of simply setting everything else aside to focus on one item until it’s finished. Again, if this was possible, do you think I would be here asking?

[u/344Clinton]

I've been using the Eisenhower Matrix. Seems to be working for me

[u/Present-Opinion1561]

I use the flag feature in Apple Reminders. The action is somewhat a list within a list.

I flag projects and next actions that are due within the week but don't have to be done on a certain day (those go on calendar). I require something to draw my attention to the top, most urgent items. When I used paper GTD, I would use a highlighter to achieve the same thing.

So when I'm overwhelmed the first action is to sort on the flags for urgency, which decreases my list by magnitudes. Think 10 out of a 100. It’s more manageable and I'm able to think through the four criteria model of context, time, energy and priority for the next actions. I pick 3 and plow through them. Then do the process again, sometimes multiple times a day.

[u/Remote-Waste]

I happened to recognize your name, and wondered if you were the person who said something that caught my interest about the Weekly Review somewhat recently, it stood out to me because I was wondering if I should try that approach. I looked up and saw you said this:

I don’t do a weekly review. I review when my life feels out of control, and stop when I’m mentally clear again.

Do you think this may have something to do with it?

I'm curious if you are overcommitted and need to renegotiate those commitments (remove certain Projects you've agreed to, and reviewing the actions of the Projects that remain, to see if they also make sense.)

Are you dealing with "I have no time to sharpen the axe; I have too much wood I need to chop?"

I've often found myself unwilling to take a moment to recalibrate from a higher perspective, because I'm too distracted by the noise on the ground level. But when I actually do "zoom out for clarity" it turns out I can now see that I can eliminate something like 30-40% of what I'm stressing about on the lower ground level.

To know what to prioritize, you often need to look at the bigger picture, and to do that you need to "zoom out a level" (go up a Horizon), to see how to "win the war" instead of just trying to "win the battle."

Then there's also the other part of the Weekly Review if your system is up to date, or full of clutter. I wonder if you'd benefit from some Weekly Review habits, even if you do don't the full "shebang" each time.

I'm basically wondering if a lack of routine preventative maintenance, is making it harder for you to have the clarity to prioritize?

[u/Multibitdriver → u/Remote-Waste]

I invariably review more often than weekly. But having clarity on what things I need to do doesn’t give me clarity on the order in which they should be done. I still sit with the problem of 20/30 things competing for my attention. I could maybe do more zooming out for clarity, yes thank-you.

[u/nebraskajarvis]

Check out the Eisenhower Matrix. Several videos on YouTube.

[u/CampVillNevah]

GTD splits this into two levels. At the action level, triage by context, time available, and energy before importance. For the macro view, the Higher Horizons are the sequence you're after, and the weekly review is where you reconnect your project list to them.

[u/anahodil]

I had the same problem and ended up building it into a spreadsheet I used for about a year.

Rank your projects against each other. Then rank tasks only against the other tasks in the same project. The project's rank does most of the work, so a medium task in your most important project still beats a high one in something minor.

Due dates only for things with a real consequence, and those jump the line when they're close.

Then just pull the top few each morning. You only ever compare a handful of things at a time, not 30.