More efficient task sorting - a trick from Dell

[Joseph Buchignani]

I've adopted Dell's task prioritization method into Cyborganize. Here's Dell's method: 

1. Use a scale from 1-5, with 1 being worst and 5 being best. 
   
2. Rate the task on time required, resources required, and impact. 
   

So something that will take lots of time, lots of resources, and have little impact would be t1 x r1 x i1 = 1

Whereas something that takes no time, costs nothing and has huge impact would be t5 x r5 x i5 = 125

Dell then ranks the tasks by their score and does the highest scoring ones first. 

BUT

I diverge from Dell in that I DON'T apply this methodology at the task level. There I think dependencies are more important. (By dependency I mean A must be completed before B can be started.) Trying to rate while taking into account dependencies is just too confusing. The objective is to reduce mental load, not increase it. 

I DO use this rating system at the PROJECT level, because typically projects are self-contained and independent. In Cyborganize the project level is located at the direct children of each of the four top-level categories for actionables.brn. 

As a reminder, the top level categories of actionables.brn are: 

1. By Time

2. Habit

3. By Priority

4. By Project

5. Reference

So how does the sorting happen with the new method? 

1. First you triage your individual tasks, sending the urgent ones to "By Time" and banishing the unimportant or tentative to "By Project". 
2. Then you sort your By Time entries into projects. 
3. Only THEN do you assign the Dell rating system to each individual project under By Time. 
   

This allows you to quickly rank the projects in the correct order and begin executing the best one. 

What happens if you DON'T use this trick? Then that last ranking step can involve significant mental energy expenditure and generate mental resistance from trying to consider too many things. By contrast, the Dell ranking method lets you small-chunk the decision. 

This simple tip has massive potential to increase your productivity, because it is at the very TOP of your execution loop. Thus it improves both the quality of your decisions and the smoothness and ease with which you prioritize. Reducing mental resistance at this critical juncture can increase your endurance for maximum productivity focused work, as opposed to meandering work during your less focused downtime. 

When you expend a great deal of mental energy and encounter mental resistance at the top of your execution loop, it can be fatiguing and demoralizing precisely when you should be most focused. It can tend to drive you into suboptimal execution paths, because you unconsciously try to avoid the hard decisions. 

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I have lots of ideas for the next wave of improvements for the Cyborganize site, but I'm not sure what should be the highest priority. Any suggestions on what's most important to fix next? 

Here are some of the things I was planning to fix:

• Add headlines on pages without them
  
• Better site nav on the right bar
  
• Longform loop video (still not sure how to make this...)
  
• Better home landing page that hits benefits and key language and new intro video that doesn't bog down in details immediately
  
• Adding an email subscribe form
  
• More emacs resources

Also, here are some topics I could write about, if anyone's interested:

• How to use a keyboard-video-mouse switch and VNC to integrate an Ubuntu computer and a Windows computer into one productivity behemoth
  
• Interview MaxThink creator about his vision of information annealing
  
• Psychology of progress and motivation and how Cyborganize accommodates this
  
• Baby steps principle and how scratch files overcome procrastination
  
• Spaced repetition critical reinforcement timing and how Cyborganize flexibly accommodates this
  

[Alexander Deliyannis - SYMPRAXIS Team (eu)]

Thanks for this excellent tip from Dell; will try to put it to use this Sunday during my week planning excercise. Now here's a situation where Brainstorm's numerical non-capability makes the program rather useless; one probably needs to switch between Brainstorm and a spreadsheet to do the calculations (I suppose the point is not to do the mentally). At least the copy-paste procedure should work OK.

 

Re priorities for the Cyborganize website, hereby a few suggestions from your own list, and a couple more:

 

•Add headlines on pages without them: essential

•Better site nav on the right bar: very useful, after the previous step has been completed

 

•Longform loop video (still not sure how to make this...): my suggestion is to simply show a few indicative posts in the T3 and T2 blogs and the T1 wiki; I don't think that an actual video is necessary.

 

•Better home landing page that hits benefits and key language and new intro video that doesn't bog down in details immediately

 

•Interview MaxThink creator about his vision of information annealing: that would be impressive

 

•Psychology of progress and motivation and how Cyborganize accommodates this: interesting, though not essential

 

[Joseph Buchignani]

Thanks Alex, I'll take this as my roadmap. 

Regarding the Dell trick, I think you're misunderstanding how I recommend using the trick, since you seem to think there are a large number of calculations involved. 

This is NOT something that is used to rank lots of tasks against each other, across different domains. I don't think it's possible to keep ratings consistent across different domains and multiple contexts, and trying to do so would generate stress. 

The only place I recommend using the Dell trick is for ranking the 5-7 project headings in your "By Time" or "By priority" outline areas in BrainStormWFO. You could MAYBE use it on the sub-tasks of a project, but probably dependencies will be more influential here. 

Doing 5 to 7 calculations like this does not require any kind of spreadsheet integration. You just rate them, then switch to your browser and google "5 x 3 x 4 =" to get the value. Repeat 5 to 7 times, and then rank them manually by the values. This only happens once per day to once per week, in my case. 

If you're trying to do this for all your tasks, then that's something different than what I recommend. I think dependencies, time urgency, intuition, and project grouping take precedence over the Dell method for the majority of the task ordering process.

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Ignore the following. It is a nonsense sentence that disables Google ads from displaying next to my emails by triggering sensitive keywords.

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

[Alexander Deliyannis - SYMPRAXIS Team (eu)]

Well, I expect that Dell uses it for more than 5-7 tasks at a time. That said, I agree with your suggestion for dependencies et al taking precedence within project tasks.

 

My own application of the method would be on independent individual tasks; I actually have quite a few of those lying around, as projects usually take precedence. I would sort them on the Dell method and then commit to doing the first one on the list within the week.

 

Re calculations; the idea was to have a direct feedback on ratings' influence to the overall sorting. 1 to 5 may sound like a simple scale, but for me the difference between 3 and 4, or 3 and 2, is not always evident. In any case, I'll play around with it in Excel and see how it goes.

[Joseph Buchignani]

I understand. Using it on miscellaneous independent tasks solves some of the problems I mentioned, and makes more sense. 

I would still say that a pre-sort to the predefined categories in the actioanbles.brn file is a better way to prioritize this type of task. 

You're talking about putting a long list of tasks into a spreadsheet and tweaking ratings to try to get consistent scores. To me that involves too much mental strain.