Intuition as a ranking strategy

Tl;Dr: I do it, you do it. Even the most GTD’re uses it often

Earlier I was writing about the 2nd  simplest Getting Things Done tool: Ranked List (the first simplest is something I call The Compost Pile). A ranked list is just things labeled 1 to n in order of importance.

The hard this is: how do you decide what’s most important? There’s a pretty big market place for systems to help you do this, but you already have a built in one: Gut Feel.

If you tell a GTD expert that your strategy is gut feel they will laugh you out of the room. But at the finest level, I’d argue most decisions are made this way. Perhaps 20% use high quality data, and maybe 2% have deep analysis done on them (think NASA planning Martian Rover navigation).

Wait wait wait you might say: our prioritization system uses 7 different quantitative variables to create rigorous metrics…

Every time I’ve seen this, the 7 variables are guesses. They’re de-composed gut feel. And there are some good reasons for de-composing (if you have a diverse team and distributed responsibility you might have less uniform bias in the guesses). But they’re still guesses. The better systems collect metrics and level of confidence so you know how big the leap of faith is.

But for simple tasks, with a team of 1 – perhaps Gut Feel is the best approach most of the time. Infact, it seems like a 2 part ranking system might be ideal:

• What is the rank?
• How confident are you in this rank?

This gives you a simple ripcord: if something is ranked in the top 20 with low confidence in the rank… It probably bears some focused attention as step 1.

For example: tomorrow I’d like to 1) take my blood pressure,  2) remove squeaks from the downstairs floors, and 3) do some bike maintenance.

I’m highly confident about 1 and 3. One should happen first because I take my blood pressure first thing in the morning, three should be third because the task is simple and it doesn’t have any other dependencies in the time of day. I can do it whenever I want.

Two is really concerning. I really would like to work on this but I don’t even know if it’s possible to do today. So as a low confidence rank, the first job on this item would be to figure out what I would need to do to get it done. This is obviously a gross effort, not a fine detailed work breakdown plan, but enough to understand how to make actionable tasks that would result in the overall project being finished.

The main takeaway I’m trying to get to is feels like a lot of getting things done systems decompose gut feel guesses into a bunch of smaller guesses, which is overhead. Maybe we can make a system that prioritizes gut feel but also has a threshold for deeper examination.