Weekly Wisdom #297 - The top prioritization mistakes I see all the time (avoid them at all costs)

Top Prioritization Mistakes, Thinking Fast and Slow, 10 Minimalist Rules & Productivity Takeaways

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Happy Monday!

Setting priorities is critical for every endeavour, whether it's starting a business, building a relationship, or tackling a hobby project.

I was chatting with a friend about priorities this week, and realized there are two main mistakes I see people make:

1: Setting too many priorities.

Humans are bad at estimating the amount of time something will take.

This has been extensively studied and documented in books like Thinking, Fast and Slow. Even when we have similar examples, we fail to estimate well.

A classic mistake, one I've made myself repeatedly, is to set multiple priorities, and pretend they are all equally important.

There are a few problems with this:

The first is that when any of these things takes longer than expected, suddenly all of the things you deemed priorities are incomplete by the end of your time.

You end up with three half-finished projects, instead of 1 fully complete project.

This is a recipe for disaster, particularly when it's something like a software product, and there are usually costs to maintaining these half-finished things.

The second is that you spend a ton of energy throughout the whole period determining which of the three things you should be working on that month/week/day.

This wastes a ton of energy from everyone involved, and further slows things down. Not to mention the cost of context switching.

There should be a single clear priority, and things should be tackled in series, one by one.

2: Not recognizing implicit non-priorities.

When you set priorities, you also implicitly lay out which things aren't your priorities.

But that's not always clearly understood or recognized, and it leads to misaligned expectations.

If your number one priority at a software company is a new feature with a hard deadline, it's likely that your team will sacrifice quality to get there, particularly if you don't talk about a minimum quality standard, or make quality a higher priority than the deadline.

When we set and communicate our priorities, we need to be careful to think about if there are any other "assumed" standards or non-priorities that we need to make clearer.

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Book Notes: Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman - This masterpiece is the summary of the greatest work on cognitive biases of our time, completed by Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Humans are full of biases and mental quirks that are near impossible to fight; the best we can do is learn to recognize when we are likely to fall prey to them, and attempt to avoid them in the first place.

This book is an excellent place to start.

📖 The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman - Altman is much better known these days since the rise of ChatGPT, but he's been in tech for a long time, and this particular piece, written when he turned 30 (9 years ago) is one of the best pieces on life advice I've ever read.

This is one you'll want to save, so you can re-read regularly.

🍿 10 Minimalist Rules That Changed My Life - Gabe Bult - This short, 8-minute video has a bunch of rules that I've used myself, and are a big help in decluttering and simplifying your life.

The Box Rule and the 90% Rule are two of my favourites.

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Tweet of the Week

​11 of the things I learned from Ali Abdaal's Feel-Good Productivity:

Graham Mann-->

@grahamkmann

I just finished reading Feel-Good Productivity by @AliAbdaal

The core message: productivity doesn't need to be associated with suffering. If you can make it fun, you can be productive.

11 lessons from the book 🧵

11:16 AM • Jan 26, 2024

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