How To Decide What Task To Do Next
It was a typical day of work. My overworked machine was chugging through a test scenario. It was going to take some time, so I was looking for what to do next. But I really had no idea. There were many things to be done, but how was I going to decide what to do next?
One thing I’ve learned over the years is that it is easier to choose between two options than it is to choose between twenty.
Parenting Trick to the Rescue
It’s a parenting trick too. You never give a toddler an open-ended choice. Always limit to two choices: “Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the green shirt?” “Do you want carrots or peas?” “Do you want to play with trucks or legos?”
It’s the same way with adults. If you give me two options I can choose much more quickly than ten. And yet my task list is never just two options.
So how can I get there?
Assembling the Options
You can’t know what to pick if you don’t know what the options are. So the first step it to assemble the list of what is needed.
It is important at this point to not make any judgement calls, but rather just make a list of everything. No editing, no telling yourself that you don’t want to or you don’t have the energy.
Ranking the List
Next up you are going to run through and order the list in two different ways.
You will be sorting the list by comparing pairs of objects.
Hours to Complete
First go through the list and from start to finish, rank the tasks in order of how many hours it will take to finish them. You may have to go through the list several times, but each time you will find that the longest-to-finish task will end up at the bottom.
If you have two tasks that will take the same number of hours to complete, choose one to be the winner. There are no ties.
(This is a bubble sort, for those of you of a technical mindset)
Days Until Due
Next you will go through the tasks and list them in the number of days until due.
However, any task without an externally-assigned due date is excluded from the list. This is to keep you from applying deadlines when the only place they exist is in your head.
Sort the list by applying the same comparison method described above.
End Result
You will now have a single task for hours to complete, and a single task for days until due.
If you are really lucky, they are the same task, and you should proceed on that task.
If you have two different tasks, go ahead and pick one to do. It doesn’t really matter which one you pick. Go with your gut.
If you need more tasks to do after you finish the first one, compare the one you didn’t do from the top task from the other list.
By sorting the tasks down to two choices, it makes it much easier to choose what to do next.
