How to Prioritize Tasks?

Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by seanw444 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @06:17PM (#34512036)

Do people really have this hard of a time deciding what task to do? If you have something that needs doing urgently, then do that. Otherwise... it just depends? There's no one-size-fits-all solution.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by simonw on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @06:36PM (#34512215)

I've long thought that the single hardest problem in startups is prioritization: figuring out the most important thing to build (or do) next.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by yaseer on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @06:52PM (#34512360)

Strongly agree with this.

One thing I realised is, startups should spend more time optimising the decision of their top priority, and less time optimising efficiency.

There's no point working on the wrong thing with 100% efficiency.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by Throw10987 on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @09:03PM (#34513453)

I have seen teams spending most of their time on working on the highest priority (by a single measure) and not spending any time on overall delivery efficiency.

So having a balanced prioritisation approach would seem to be pretty important.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by seadan83 on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @01:28AM (#34515080)

Agree to this. My personal thesis is paying the cost of doing it quickly is not payed months in a nebulous future, but often mere _hours_

A good bit of literature is starting to dispel the notion of the iron triangle, speed is quality, quality is speed.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by ozim on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @07:58PM (#34512900)

It also is that while building new product often there is no single thing that is urgent but everything needs to be done.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by nerdponx on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @08:37PM (#34513238)

* * *

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by JamesBarney on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @06:19PM (#34512062)

This might work when working at large companies, but when running my own startup the problem is the urgent tasks will smother the important ones.

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by hacker_junky on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @07:10PM (#34512501)

Good question! Do you have a personal strategy for deciding which task to prioritize, if any?

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Re:How to Prioritize Tasks? by comboy on Tuesday January 24, 2023 @07:44PM (#34512778)

It is a very complex function which takes into account all your previous experiences, your value system and your estimations regarding the future.

Good news though! Your brain already computed it, and presents you the answer in the form of "I want to do that thing right now".

Quick debug sheet:

- my brain in wrong, what I want is not what I should - are you sure? Figure out your narration. If you ever have been excited about some project you know how well your "want" will align with your "should". You may be stuck in some story about yourself which you haven't updated.

- I want it all! Yeah you are really still just looking, if you are not sure what you want, that's not really a problem. It's fine to not want anything in particular. If you keep telling yourself you really want it all just choose at random, and then when you "have time" slowly and patiently explain yourself that your time is finite, and amount of ideas you can come up with, not necessarily.

I suggest also trusting yourself with this. Worst case scenario you spend some time doing the thing you wanted to do and observing that will be a valuable data point (automatically integrated) into your future "I want to".

edit: I answered it in the context of personal lists, startups have much simpler optimization function

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