Let me get this straight…

How many top priorities do you think you have? I suspect you read the title of this post and figured out that unless you said one, you’re wrong. This seems to be an incredibly hard concept for people to get. Actually, come to think of it, maybe you can help me. How do I communicate better about this fact? I get really frustrated when people don’t understand this. Please, comment – tell me how I get this concept communicated.

Let’s try some examples: You’re batman, and your girlfriend is about to be blown up. But the joker cleverly is about to blow up the mayor at the same time. So, you have a choice to make. They’re both equally important is not a valid answer. you must pick one. If you fail to pick one, you lose both of them. I don’t care who you pick, but whoever you pick, you are stating that that is your number one priority. Period. They are not equally important.

You’re in charge of a big client. You have a month long project with major financial implications. Another client calls and says they need a quick report. You now have a decision to make. Which is more important? I don’t care if you have enough resources to handle them both. If everyone but you gets hit by the lottery bus*, you now have to pick which one to work on.

And don’t give me “well, the month long project is my number one priority, but I can do this quickly, so I’ll just do it”. No, that’s wrong. That just became your number one priority.

I’ll tell you the solution to this difficulty, but I’m serious – I want help communicating it. The solution to how to address it is quite simply to break everything down into very small tasks, and prioritize those. Pick an atomic unit of work – say, 2 hour estimate tasks, and break everything into chunks of that size. Don’t tell me you can’t do that for the big project. You do it all the time, just implicitly, not explicitly. Then, at any given time, you can decide exactly what your top priority is. Don’t compare the month long project to the ad hoc request. Compare “write this query” to “respond to this client’s request”. That’s a much easier comparison to make.

Now your turn – since I’m a jerk and communicate rather aggressively (which puts people on the defensive), how do I succeed in actually getting this message across? Obviously I’m writing a blog post as one attempt – we’ll see how successful that is. What do you suggest?

* you can thank Andi for the lottery bus – she thinks we should be nice when we describe why people might not show up for work. everyone else in the world uses “he might get hit by a bus”, but Andi thinks being hit by a bus is not nice, so Andi thinks we should say “he might win the lottery”. Except, if I won the lottery, I’d still show up to work. So, to help Andi feel better about people getting hit by buses, I make it the lottery bus.