Discussion Forum > Least urgent first - guidance please
Dear Paddy
The point of the "Do the least urgent thing first" principle is to encourage people to use all the time available for a project. This means that they can take full advantage of doing things "little and often" and also avoid the stress of being driven by deadlines.
Suppose you have a project which is due in three months' time but will only take one month's work. People have a tendency to wait for two months and then start on the project. This means that the first two month are entirely wasted as far as the project is concerned. You might just as well have been tasked with it only one month beforehand.
If you start work on it as soon as you are given it, i.e. when it is non-urgent, then you can work on it in a far less hurried manner and it is never going to become an emergency. This will increase the quality of the finished project at far less stress to you.
As far as jeopardising other projects is concerned, will you have no other short and medium term projects to deal with if you leave the project to the last moment? I'm sure you will - and they are much more likely to be jeopardised because your long-term project no longer has any flexibility.
The point of the "Do the least urgent thing first" principle is to encourage people to use all the time available for a project. This means that they can take full advantage of doing things "little and often" and also avoid the stress of being driven by deadlines.
Suppose you have a project which is due in three months' time but will only take one month's work. People have a tendency to wait for two months and then start on the project. This means that the first two month are entirely wasted as far as the project is concerned. You might just as well have been tasked with it only one month beforehand.
If you start work on it as soon as you are given it, i.e. when it is non-urgent, then you can work on it in a far less hurried manner and it is never going to become an emergency. This will increase the quality of the finished project at far less stress to you.
As far as jeopardising other projects is concerned, will you have no other short and medium term projects to deal with if you leave the project to the last moment? I'm sure you will - and they are much more likely to be jeopardised because your long-term project no longer has any flexibility.
November 15, 2007 at 15:52 |
Mark Forster
Mark Forster
While I certainly agree that most projects would benefit from being started earlier on, I'm struggling to imagine any circumstances in which the principle of 'least urgent first' could be consistently applied without jeopardising some projects. Obviously, short and medium term projects become urgent sooner than long term ones - so if one devotes too much time to the latter it will be at the expense of the former.
Are you saying that, when one is choosing between a number of projects, none of which is especially urgent, then one should feel at liberty to choose the least urgent one (particularly if it was a complex, multi-stage undertaking) rather than routinely choosing the most urgent one? Or are you being more prescriptive than that?