Triage First

When there are too many tasks, the natural reaction is to declare everything urgent. After that the word “urgent” carries no information, and the work gets done in order of who is loudest.

Triage is a preliminary sorting by condition, urgency, likely benefit and available resources. It came out of medicine and battlefield surgery, but the principle applies far more widely.

For each task it helps to judge:

• what happens if it is delayed;
• when irreversible damage sets in;
• how much time there actually is;
• what the result is worth;
• how likely success is;
• how many resources it will take;
• whether other work depends on it;
• whether the problem can be solved later, cheaper or another way.

After that, tasks split into more than “do” and “don’t do.”

Some need action now. Some can be assigned a specific date. Some should be handed over. Some should be watched. Some have already lost their point. Some can’t be helped with the means available, and further spending only takes resources from those who still can be.

The last category is particularly unpleasant. But refusing to admit a limit creates no extra capacity. It only distributes the shortage at random.

Urgent tasks do exist. A fire doesn’t become less urgent because of your philosophical attitude to the calendar. The mistake is to treat urgency as the only criterion.

A small urgent problem can matter less than a large task due in a week. If you always react only to the nearest signal, long-term work never gets resources until it turns into an emergency itself.

Good sorting doesn’t remove the shortage of time. It makes explicit the decision about who gets that time. That is what we usually call priorities when we don’t want to use the word “no.”

Sources and further reading

Parkinson, C. N. (1955, November 19). Parkinson’s law. The Economist.

Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493

Ariely, D., & Wertenbroch, K. (2002). Procrastination, deadlines, and performance: Self-control by precommitment. Psychological Science, 13(3), 219–224. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00441

Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work: More speed and stress. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 107–110). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072

Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65

It shows up clearly in a week where everything is urgent. On Monday the printer breaks, on Tuesday a client wants an answer today, on Wednesday an email arrives marked “important” from someone who marks everything that way. By Friday all of it is done, and the quarterly accounts due in ten days haven’t been started. In ten days they will become the next emergency — a thoroughly deserved one.

The word “urgent” is convenient because it requires no justification. Asking “what happens if this is done on Tuesday” is almost impolite, which is exactly why the question saves more time than any system of lists. Half the time the answer is: “nothing, I was just afraid of forgetting.”

Part IV