If your plans are greater than your capacity to do stuff, you need to set priorities. Prioritizing is a way to achieve some of your goals sooner, at the cost of achieving some other goals later (or not at all). Prioritizing is not a magical tool to achieve all of your goals sooner. If you cannot make an explicit decision to postpone some goals, by definition you are unable to set priorities.
Adding the words “priority: urgent” to a task achieves the desired effect only if there are other tasks without the label “priority: urgent”. Giving the label to all your tasks is equivalent to giving it to none of them. For example, if you create a planning spreadsheet or configure a planning software with priorities from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest) only to find later that each task is assigned a priority 1, then the truth is that your company or division does not have priorities.
Even if you use different priorities, but the tasks labeled “priority: urgent” exceed your capacity to do stuff, then effectively every other label becomes synonymous to “this will never be done”, and the label “priority: urgent” itself will mean “this should be done, but we are unable to set priorities for the stuff that should be done”. For example, if your priorities are from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest), but the number of tasks with priority 1 exceeds the capacity of your team, then the tasks with priority 2 will never get done, despite the impression that the number 2 seems better than average on the scale from 1 to 5. And you still have not set priorities within the set of tasks that have priority 1.
Exercise 1: Your team has two employees, each of them working 8 hours a day. To meet the deadline, you would need on average 24 man-hours of work done each remaining day. Instead of hiring another employee, your colleague in management suggests that it would be better to spend that money instead to pay an external company to install an intranet website where managers will be able to assign a priority to each task. Your colleague shows you a research suggesting that tasks with higher priority statistically get completed sooner than tasks with lower priority. Thus, setting a high priority to all your tasks should solve the problem with the deadline. What could possibly go wrong?
Exercise 2: You have an employee working 8 hours a day on an important continuous task that requires 8 hours of their time every day. There is another, less urgent task that needs to be done, that requires only 20 hours of work, once. You assign the second task to the same employee, but specify that this task has lower priority than the original task, because if the original task gets behind the schedule, there would be bad consequences for the company, and then also for the given employee. How many days on average will it take the employee to complete the second task?
Rationality for managers, part 374:
If your plans are greater than your capacity to do stuff, you need to set priorities. Prioritizing is a way to achieve some of your goals sooner, at the cost of achieving some other goals later (or not at all). Prioritizing is not a magical tool to achieve all of your goals sooner. If you cannot make an explicit decision to postpone some goals, by definition you are unable to set priorities.
Adding the words “priority: urgent” to a task achieves the desired effect only if there are other tasks without the label “priority: urgent”. Giving the label to all your tasks is equivalent to giving it to none of them. For example, if you create a planning spreadsheet or configure a planning software with priorities from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest) only to find later that each task is assigned a priority 1, then the truth is that your company or division does not have priorities.
Even if you use different priorities, but the tasks labeled “priority: urgent” exceed your capacity to do stuff, then effectively every other label becomes synonymous to “this will never be done”, and the label “priority: urgent” itself will mean “this should be done, but we are unable to set priorities for the stuff that should be done”. For example, if your priorities are from 1 (highest) to 5 (lowest), but the number of tasks with priority 1 exceeds the capacity of your team, then the tasks with priority 2 will never get done, despite the impression that the number 2 seems better than average on the scale from 1 to 5. And you still have not set priorities within the set of tasks that have priority 1.
Exercise 1: Your team has two employees, each of them working 8 hours a day. To meet the deadline, you would need on average 24 man-hours of work done each remaining day. Instead of hiring another employee, your colleague in management suggests that it would be better to spend that money instead to pay an external company to install an intranet website where managers will be able to assign a priority to each task. Your colleague shows you a research suggesting that tasks with higher priority statistically get completed sooner than tasks with lower priority. Thus, setting a high priority to all your tasks should solve the problem with the deadline. What could possibly go wrong?
Exercise 2: You have an employee working 8 hours a day on an important continuous task that requires 8 hours of their time every day. There is another, less urgent task that needs to be done, that requires only 20 hours of work, once. You assign the second task to the same employee, but specify that this task has lower priority than the original task, because if the original task gets behind the schedule, there would be bad consequences for the company, and then also for the given employee. How many days on average will it take the employee to complete the second task?