So how am I getting on with the two goals I set myself originally now that I have five days worth of data?

First the walking goal is going very nicely. I am slightly on the wrong side of the “yellow brick road”, but this will solve itself the next time I do a long walk. Having the goal has certainly encouraged me to keep walking and has also encouraged me to do a good length every day. I took a day off yesterday. Days off are necessary but sometimes it’s difficult to get going again the next day. Because I needed a good result for Beeminder, I didn’t have any trouble at all.

The actual data points are the unjoined dots, while all the other lines and lanes are various types of average. As long as I stay in the broad yellow path I’m all right.

The weight goal is even better. I have lost 3.5 lbs already! Actually quick loss of this type is not uncommon when one starts a weight loss program. The real battle comes further down the line when the initial rate of gain slows down.

Because this type of goal gives a week’s level start to get acclimatized I am well ahead of the game.

It remains to be seen whether the slice of delicious chocolate cake I had in Dorking to reward myself after my walk this afternoon will effect my weight tomorrow morning.

The moral of this is that the game should be used only for those things which you want to give priority to getting done - certainly the total shouldn’t be in double figures. You can and will of course do many things which aren’t on the list.

Starting off well is easy enough though - what is more difficult is keeping going. I think Beeminder will be excellent for that, but I’ve not yet proved it for myself. But looking at some of the graphs of progress made by subscribers and the Beeminder staff themselves, I can only describe them as amazing.

However as a time management “guru”, I naturally started thinking about how to make a complete time management system out of Beeminder. It would be too cumbersome to make a separate Beeminder goal for everything I’m working on at the moment. And even if I did, I’d probably spend more time entering the data and looking at the pretty graphs than I did doing the work.

I noticed a couple of attempts in this direction on the Beeminder site (and there may be more which I’ve missed). Team members plot the number of hours work they do working on developing Beeminder. That’s good, but hours worked doesn’t necessarily equate to productivity - though in their case I’m sure it does. They also track the number of improvements made to Beeminder (goal: one per day). And I noticed a mention of tracking how many “important jobs” were done each day.

These are still very focused on a few particular goals, and not on success at living all the many aspects of our lives.  That’s not intended as a criticism. Focusing on one or two things and letting everything else find its own place is very effective. But I’d still like something more comprehensive.

And then it struck me that I already had the ideal answer in a time management game I’d written years before.

It’s extremely simple:

1. Draw up a list of tasks you intend to do today, and award yourself one point for each task you succeed in doing. It’s important to define each task clearly so you’ve either done it or you haven’t.
2. But here’s the catch - if you don’t succeed in doing all the tasks on your list, you score 0. No excuses accepted!
   

This is ideal for being tracked in Beeminder, and I think the way that Beeminder presents the results will turn this from an interesting exercise into a powerful means of keeping yourself on track. It forces you to consider what your priorities are for the day and also - perhaps even more importantly - forces you to consider what realistically you can get done. And as a bonus it forces you to control interruptions and “emergencies” so they don’t prevent you from achieving your goal for the day.

I’ve started up another Beeminder goal to track this. Today I’m going for 17 points (this blog post is one of them). The consequences of failure are unthinkable.

I also make the point that this is not a direct relationship. Something is not more urgent simply because it’s more important. Urgency is importance translated into a time scale that is appropriate for the task.

We’ve looked at how to allocate tasks their place on the urgent/not-urgent scale. Now it’s time to look at what importance is and how we can tell how important a particular task or project is.

The first point to make is the obvious one that what is important to one person may not be at all important to someone else and vice versa. There may of course be considerable overlap between people, particularly in matters of politics, environment and religion, but basically each person has their own individual set of interests, preferences and matters of concern.

So we are not trying to discover some abstract quality of “importance” that belongs inalienably to a task or project. What we are trying to discover is how important it is to us.

Faced with a question like “Which is more important, buying a new car or extending the house?”, how do we decide?

We can try all sorts of ways of quantifying this, but I would suggest that the simplest way is in terms of timescale, i.e.

“How long are we prepared to put up with the old car?”

“How long are we prepared to put up with the house the way it is?”

That will give you the answer of which to do first. And if the answer to either question is “Indefinitely”, then you can simply cross that project off your list.

This can be applied to all sorts of situations:

“How long do I want to stay in this job?”

“Should I call Aunt May sooner or later?

“When do I aim  to get my next promotion?”

“When is the right time to start this report?”

“How much longer am I going to wait until I can play the guitar reasonably well?”

“How much longer am I going to put up with this not working properly?”

“When am I going to stop having a backlog of email?”

If the answer to any of these questions is “indefinitely”, “never” or “I don’t know yet”, then you can remove the project from your list for now.

Once you’ve made a commitment to a project it ceases to be a matter of importance because a commitment implies that you have committed yourself to doing the work involved. It then becomes a matter of relative urgency appropriate to the work. For example learning to play the guitar requires a daily effort. That tells you how urgent each practice session is. Calling Aunt May on the other hand is a single task (or possibly a weekly or monthly one) and that is a different degree of urgency. Both the guitar and calling Aunt May may only be appropriate at certain times of day, so they have a higher degree of urgency during those time and none at all at others.

It may seem odd to you that both the degree of importance and the degree of urgency should be expressed in terms of time for prioritizing purposes. But that is what prioritizing is all about: the order in which tasks are done.

What I particularly like about it is that it gives you some very sophisticated ways of keeping on track, including some very nice coloured charts with lots of different bits of information.

I’ve started two challenges for myself today. The first is to work myself up to being able to walk 24 miles in a day (I could do 16 before Christmas but have regressed since then).

Here’s the graph that goes with that:

Basically I have to keep myself within the yellow brick road, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

The second challenge is to lose some weight, and here is the image for that (I’ve removed the incriminating evidence for this one!)

Note that in this sort of goal you get a period of grace at the beginning in which you aim to keep your weight flat.

I’ll post these images again in a few days time, so you can see how I’m getting on and how Beeminder deals with my results.

So how do we decide what urgency to give a task?

By its importance to us of course.

But note that this importance isn’t a direct relationship. We have to give it the degree of urgency that is appropriate to the task. We can’t just say “Task X is more important than Task Y: therefore I’ll do Task X first”. That is where prioritizing by importance falls down. No doubt saving the world is more important than eating breakfast, but it still makes sense to eat breakfast before we set out on our work for saving the world.

You’ll see from the above example that urgency is very sensitive to time. Particularly when we are dealing with minor but necessary tasks there are times of day when they are urgent and times of day when they are not. Eating breakfast is not urgent in the evening, but can be very urgent in the morning.

Let’s have a look at the processes involved in prioritizing by importance and contrast them with prioritizing by urgency:

Prioritizing by importance

Make commitment to a task or project

Decide on its importance

Do it as soon as more important tasks have been done

Prioritizing by urgency

Make commitment to a task or project

Decide on its importance

Allocate urgency appropriate to the type of project/task in accordance with its importance

Do it as soon as more urgent tasks have been done

Next article: How do we tell how important a task is?

How urgent is it to check my email?

How urgent is it to write the next article on my blog?

How urgent is my daily exercise?

How urgent is it to repaint the dining room?

How urgent is it to call my aunt?

How urgent is it to start preparing for Christmas? (my wife has started already!)

How urgent is it to tidy my desk?

How urgent is it to start writing a book if the deadline is six months away?

How urgent is it to write the briefing papers for next month’s meeting?

If you start trying to prioritize by urgency you will find that you are faced with this kind of question over and over again. It’s here that one is tempted to fall back into prioritizing by importance: writing the book is more important than tidying my desk therefore I will write the book in preference to tidying my desk. The problem with that approach is that writing the book is going to continue to be more important than tidying my desk for the next six months, so I may end up with a very untidy desk.

The answer to the question “How do we tell how urgent a task is?” is that in the majority of cases we can’t. Some tasks have obvious negative consequences if we delay them like missing a bus or missing the next issue of the newspaper, but for most there is no “correct” degree of urgency.

The fact is that we have to allocate the urgency ourselves. So how urgent is checking our email? The answer to that will depend on whether we have a policy of checking our email once a day or three times a day or every time a new email arrives. That’s up to us. How urgent is repainting our dining room? That depends on how long we are prepared to put up with the existing decor. Again that’s up to us. How urgent is our daily exercise? That depends on whether we have a set time during the day or not. And - you guessed it - that’s up to us!

The questions I have are “Does Prioritizing by Urgency deserve its bad reputation?” and its corollary “Is Prioritizing by Importance all that it’s cracked up to be?”

If you construct a To-Do list in which all the tasks relate to your commitments (and every to-do list should be constructed on that basis), then everything on that list ultimately has to be done. You have, in other words, to have the intention to meet the specifications that go with each of your commitments. If you don’t have that intention, it’s not a commitment. And if it’s not a commitment it shouldn’t be on your to-do list.

Having accepted that everything on your to-do list has to be done, then the easiest and most direct way of getting through the list would be a simple First In First Out method. You do the list in the order in which tasks get written on the list. Importance makes no difference to the order, because if everything has to be done everything is equally important.

Of course we all know that this FIFO method wouldn’t work, and the reason it wouldn’t work is because tasks have different degrees of urgency. Urgency is what makes it necessary for us to do one particular task before another regardless of where it’s written on the list.

Urgency is in fact the natural way to prioritize. We do things first because they need to be done first. The farmer sows the seed and later the crop appears. At one time sowing becomes urgent and at another reaping. There is no possible way of saying that sowing is more important than reaping or vice versa.

Why then does prioritizing by urgency have such a bad press? I think there are two reasons:

The first is that people tend to think of the degree of urgency a task has in terms of when the task needs to be finished, when in fact the urgency relates to when the task needs to be started. This misconception is one reason why Prioritizing by Urgency is so often equated with deadline-chasing.

The second is that in the complications of modern life people very rarely do actually prioritize by urgency. They only start to prioritize by urgency when their other methods, or lack of them, have failed. The result is the same as in the first reason: deadline-chasing.

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