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Meg Edwards
The Three-Fold Nature of Prioritizing
When we enter into the “Doing” phases in GTD we have to take into consideration how we are prioritizing what we are doing. Prioritizing is a highly intuitive process. The only way you can truly know that the thing you are doing right now is the highest priority is if you have everything clearly defined so you can make an informed choice from moment to moment.
“Meg, I have the label maker and my files are all set up. I have set up my inbox and my categories. I have started to create an inventory of all my projects and next actions. Now that I have done this, how do I figure out what to do when I walk into my office on Monday morning? Do I do what is on the calendar or my next action lists? Do I talk to my colleague who just asked for a minute of my time? Do I process the in-basket, or work on email?” As the Director of Telecoaching for The David Allen Company, these are some of the most frequently asked questions I receive.
We prioritize based on three ways of looking at To-do’s: The Criteria for Choosing Action (see Getting Things Done, p.192) The Three-Fold Nature of Work, or the Priority Hierarchy of our lives (see Getting Things Done, p. 200). I’m going to spend some time exploring the Three- Fold nature of work.
The Three-Fold Nature consists of:
1. Doing work that has been pre-defined. Defined work encompasses a complete project list and a comprehensive next action list as well as anything on your calendar.
2. Doing work as it appears. This is also known as interruptions or work that appears unexpectedly.
3. Defining your work. This requires taking time to think about and clarify the outcome for each project and all your next actions. Defining your work is done as often as necessary and at least once a week during the Weekly Review.
So, how do you decide what you need to be doing when?
Let’s say you’ve decided the most important thing you can do in the next fifteen minutes is return calls off your Next Action Calls list (doing pre-defined work). Seven minutes into this, your colleague Mark shows up at your desk.
“Got a minute?” he asks.
You know what that really means is, “I need your full and undivided attention for the next 20 minutes and there’s a good chance you are going to get an additional two hours of critical work you hadn’t planned on as a result of our conversation.”
Does this scenario sound familiar? This is the nature of how unexpected work appears. You have now entered into the moment of choice. One option is to get a little more information from Mark about what he wants and how much time it is really going to take. Once you have that information you can now look at the work that has just shown up against everything on your pre-defined list so that you can make a strategic choice rather than being at the mercy of the work as it comes to you.
You move out of being a victim to whatever is thrown your way into being more proactive in your choices. To do this, it requires taking time to think. As David Allen says, "You need to think about your stuff more than you think, but not as much as you're afraid you might." The 30 seconds to two minutes you take to think about what your choices are in that moment, will move you from reactively handling the latest and loudest (aka "the busy trap") to making and executing thoughtful and deliberate choices in which you know you are doing the most appropriate task.
Now you can understand why it is important to define your work, which is the third option in the Three-Fold Nature of work. Defining your work requires time. In other words, if you don’t take the time to clarify and think about your work regularly, the time you will end up doing it will be at 7:00 at night or over the weekend or sometime outside your regular work hours. Some of you may be familiar with that experience. The challenge many people face is that most corporate cultures look at taking the time to define work as a luxury not as a part of the job. You have to take the initiative to build time in to think about and define your work. That’s why it’s so important to do the Weekly Review.
As you can see, prioritizing is a very complex activity. There is no simple answer on how to prioritize. Thought needs to be put into it and systems need to be in place so that choices can be made from a more strategic place. When you do, prioritizing becomes much easier!
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