Keep Pedaling Us

Eyes>Stomach: Time as priority

Tl;Dr: Organizing things by when they must be done is a way of prioritizing

There are 2 properties in the Eisenhower Matrix: Important and Urgent. Urgent is of course related to Time. The laziest way of setting priority of tasks is just wait until things are urgent, then do them. The consequence of this is: important things get neglected until they’re urgent and you typically rush working on them. And yet, prioritizing by time is still important.

An answer to: “What do I have to do today?” is: all the things that are must be done. If this is how you organize your time…

  • You might be overloaded, or you might be scott free
  • You are at the mercy of whom ever set the deadlines
  • Your free time is spent worrying/fantasizing about alll the things you want to do (but don’t, since they aren’t urgent)

We need some way of prioritizing that’s different than deadline and different than priority. I’m thinking about using priority as Must/Should/May/TBD as per RFC2119

  • add anything on your mind – it goes to the Inbox by default
    • May add Priority (Must P1/Should P2/May P3/ TBD P4) and/or Deadline
    • Deadline should be: the date after which this isn’t relevant any more (Task can be deleted)
    • Duration label
  • Daily:
    • Review Inbox:
      • Add dates:
        • Today: What I could do today
        • Later: next week, next month
      • Add priority
      • add duration
  • Weekly
    • Review Inbox
    • Retrospect Projects – Are there things I’m neglecting?
    • For large duration – add subtasks
  • Monthly –
    • Review ‘Next Month’ backlog – sort into This week, next week, next month
    • Retrospect Projects – what can I kill? What do I need to add?
    • Move things that don’t have a due date to Notes

Open issues: Date or Deadline?

Deadlines should be: The time after which this doesn’t matter any more (or when things need to be seriously reconsidered). For example: Buy Christmast Gifts should have a deadline of 12/24.

Dates should be: The time at which you think you might be able to do something about it. And the fidelity should be:

  1. What day this week
  2. Should do it sometime next week
  3. Consider in the future (move to Next month)

You could have a ‘Much much later’ category, but I’d like to try that out as a ‘for the future’ list in Obsidian.