Discussion Forum > Reverse order of urgency?
Brian M:
The rule is intended to counteract the tendency to put projects off until the last minute, with the result that however long one has to do something it will still receive insufficient attention.
For instance if you have a report on Project X to submit in a month's time you may start off by saying to yourself that it's not urgent. The result is that you may well forget about it altogether until you are a few days short of the deadline. At this stage you have a lot of other overdue work so you can only spare half a day to write the report. Since you've rushed it it will have insufficient research and inadequate conclusions.
If instead your boss said "I want a report on Project X on my desk before close of play today", you would get exactly the same result - half a day's rushed work.
In other words, whether you have one month or one day to write the report, you only spend half a day on it.
If on the other hand you start work on the report as soon as you are tasked with it, you will have a whole month be able to adequately research it and think through your conclusions, producing a much superior report without having to rush to meet the deadline.
Let's take the example you give of "five tasks on my Will Do list and only one is due tomorrow, the other four due in a week".
I make a distinction in my book between tasks that are urgent in themselves and tasks which are only urgent because we haven't got round to doing them yet. In other words we've made them urgent by neglecting them. If you were given the task due tomorrow today, then it's genuinely urgent. The rule isn't intended to apply to that sort of task.
But if you were given the "urgent" task a week ago and it's only urgent because you haven't done anything about it, then if you'd applied the rule you wouldn't have the problem. You would have got the task out of the way when you were given it.
The rule is intended to counteract the tendency to put projects off until the last minute, with the result that however long one has to do something it will still receive insufficient attention.
For instance if you have a report on Project X to submit in a month's time you may start off by saying to yourself that it's not urgent. The result is that you may well forget about it altogether until you are a few days short of the deadline. At this stage you have a lot of other overdue work so you can only spare half a day to write the report. Since you've rushed it it will have insufficient research and inadequate conclusions.
If instead your boss said "I want a report on Project X on my desk before close of play today", you would get exactly the same result - half a day's rushed work.
In other words, whether you have one month or one day to write the report, you only spend half a day on it.
If on the other hand you start work on the report as soon as you are tasked with it, you will have a whole month be able to adequately research it and think through your conclusions, producing a much superior report without having to rush to meet the deadline.
Let's take the example you give of "five tasks on my Will Do list and only one is due tomorrow, the other four due in a week".
I make a distinction in my book between tasks that are urgent in themselves and tasks which are only urgent because we haven't got round to doing them yet. In other words we've made them urgent by neglecting them. If you were given the task due tomorrow today, then it's genuinely urgent. The rule isn't intended to apply to that sort of task.
But if you were given the "urgent" task a week ago and it's only urgent because you haven't done anything about it, then if you'd applied the rule you wouldn't have the problem. You would have got the task out of the way when you were given it.
November 2, 2016 at 23:26 |
Mark Forster
Mark Forster
In DIT you recommend doing the least urgent things first. Are you defining urgency as merely when a task is due? If I have five tasks on my Will Do list and only one is due tomorrow, the other four due in a week, wouldn't this approach be more likely to put me at risk of not completing the most urgent task by tomorrow? After all, even if I have mastered estimating the time required per task and the amount of work time I have to complete them, life is unpredictable and a random same-day task could interrupt my day or I may just run into a problem on the least-urgent task that demanded it take more time than originally estimated.
On software projects, we often try to do the most complex task early in our agile sprints because they have the most uncertainty and therefore are the highest risk for taking longer than estimated. They are not more urgent than other tasks but it seems somewhat analogous to your concept.
Also, do you factor in energy and motivation level? I'm most productive in the morning so if I used those highly productive hours on the least urgent tasks I might be mentally fatigued at the end of the day when working on the urgent task. Again, I don't mean to conflate urgency with complexity, but my concern is the same that due to lower energy levels I might put the most urgent task at higher risk of remaining incomplete.
Thank you.