Your walking through a clearing in the woods by yourself. It’s 30 minutes before sunset. All of sudden you hear an explosion. Where’s it coming from? You look up and see a hot-air balloon falling out of the sky and hurtling towards the ground. There are multiple people on board. Some are jumping out of the balloon and bouncing through the trees. They all landed in one area in the middle of the forest. You rush over there and the closer you get the louder you can hear the moans and screams, some people crying, others yelling for help, but you know the scariest people are the ones not making any sound at all.
What do you do?
Triage- Know How to Prioritize
One of the biggest hang-ups people have in life is figuring out what they should do, where they should focus their attention. And even after they have eliminated the unnecessary tasks and identified the ones that need to be done, in what order?
In The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss writes that often the task that we most need to do is the one that we most fear doing or have been putting off the longest.
Sometimes, however, we don’t have time to put off tasks any longer. They need to be done in the immediate. How do we figure out where to start?
Enter triage, the system that medical professions the world over use to identify the level of severity of a patient, which allows rescuers to devote their energy and resources to the people that need them the most.
Once again we utilize a system that relies only on preschool knowledge…Colors!
Green-The Walking Wounded
These are the people or ideas that do not require our immediate assistance. They may require some patching up or an eventual trip to the hospital, but they should not be our focus. They’ll be fine waiting.
Ironically, these are often the tasks that we tackle first, the minute, ineffective ones. These are the ones that allow us to feel productive although we never actually accomplish anything. The reason for this is that minor tasks are an unending river flowing towards us, they will never stop. So if we continue to only focus on these and disregard more important tasks, we will be spinning our wheels and burning out without ever making a meaningful contribution towards our goals.
Yellow-Observation
In a disaster there are inevitably going to be people with pretty menacing looking issues, at least on the surface, they are screaming and yelling, but when you look closer you realize that they are not in immediate need of attention. They are stable. They do, however, need to be monitored because the situation could slip from bad to worse. If you have people and resources to spare, divert them to these people, but know where they fall in the triage.
These yellow tasks are the ones that, if you have already focussed on the Red, then you should address them and do so seriously. They eventually have to get done and deserve attention, but you need to prioritize them in regard to the other tasks that you need to finish first. Keep an eye on them because they can easily slip into the next category, which is no bueno. Don’t let them get out of control or go too long without being handled, but focus your energy always on the red tasks first.
Red- Immediate
The bulk of your energy and resources should be devoted to these people. They requirelife-saving prevention. Immediate action must be take to ensure their survival. They cannot wait for you to eventually get to them. If you do nothing, they will die.
These tasks are usually quite apparent to us. There is an impending deadline and we know that if we miss it then we will be screwed. However, we too often wait to complete these tasks until they are right around the corner, staring us in the face. Redtasks are only so because we let them get that far; we allowed them to slip from yellowbecause we failed to monitor them closely. It’s always best to do these tasks early before the deadline However, if they do make it this far, don’t let them get any worse, stop them before they turn Black.
Black-Expectant
Think back to the beginning story. You’ve come across a group of injured patients from a horrific accident. There are people with a variety of injuries and you need to figure out who to help first and who to ignore. This is the hardest part.
A severed arm. Eviscerated abdomen Massive head trauma.
In a perfect world, these are the people that we should help first because they are at the most immediate risk of death. However, we have limited capabilities and resources, and we need to divert those towards those with the best chance of survival.
Unfortunately, there are some that we need to let go of, at least until more help arrives.
Now realize that every once in a while you may completely ignore something that you’ve known you needed to do for a while. You just kept putting it off and putting it off. You missed the deadline. You forget to send in the paperwork. You kept coming up with excuses and now it’s an uphill battle trying to recover. You need to know your priorities. Your resources, i.e. willpower, are finite, you cannot do everything. You need to allocate these precious commodities towards the tasks that are going to reap the largest benefit from your efforts.
The key is to never let a task progress this far. You need to be proactive and prevent things from escalating to Black, but if you fail to have the discipline to stop them from getting here, you must use your discipline to know when to cut your losses and aim your focus where it will be most effective.
***
By having a simple system that allows you to prioritize your tasks, it enables you to default into a routine of tackling them instead of relying on your finite willpower to sort them out every time.
Now you know, address the immediate problems and don’t lose control of them. After that, work you way back down the priority checklist and systematically remove these tasks from your to-do list.
What do you do?
Triage- Know How to Prioritize
One of the biggest hang-ups people have in life is figuring out what they should do, where they should focus their attention. And even after they have eliminated the unnecessary tasks and identified the ones that need to be done, in what order?
In The Four Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss writes that often the task that we most need to do is the one that we most fear doing or have been putting off the longest.
Sometimes, however, we don’t have time to put off tasks any longer. They need to be done in the immediate. How do we figure out where to start?
Enter triage, the system that medical professions the world over use to identify the level of severity of a patient, which allows rescuers to devote their energy and resources to the people that need them the most.
Once again we utilize a system that relies only on preschool knowledge…Colors!
Green-The Walking Wounded
These are the people or ideas that do not require our immediate assistance. They may require some patching up or an eventual trip to the hospital, but they should not be our focus. They’ll be fine waiting.
Ironically, these are often the tasks that we tackle first, the minute, ineffective ones. These are the ones that allow us to feel productive although we never actually accomplish anything. The reason for this is that minor tasks are an unending river flowing towards us, they will never stop. So if we continue to only focus on these and disregard more important tasks, we will be spinning our wheels and burning out without ever making a meaningful contribution towards our goals.
Yellow-Observation
In a disaster there are inevitably going to be people with pretty menacing looking issues, at least on the surface, they are screaming and yelling, but when you look closer you realize that they are not in immediate need of attention. They are stable. They do, however, need to be monitored because the situation could slip from bad to worse. If you have people and resources to spare, divert them to these people, but know where they fall in the triage.
These yellow tasks are the ones that, if you have already focussed on the Red, then you should address them and do so seriously. They eventually have to get done and deserve attention, but you need to prioritize them in regard to the other tasks that you need to finish first. Keep an eye on them because they can easily slip into the next category, which is no bueno. Don’t let them get out of control or go too long without being handled, but focus your energy always on the red tasks first.
Red- Immediate
The bulk of your energy and resources should be devoted to these people. They requirelife-saving prevention. Immediate action must be take to ensure their survival. They cannot wait for you to eventually get to them. If you do nothing, they will die.
These tasks are usually quite apparent to us. There is an impending deadline and we know that if we miss it then we will be screwed. However, we too often wait to complete these tasks until they are right around the corner, staring us in the face. Redtasks are only so because we let them get that far; we allowed them to slip from yellowbecause we failed to monitor them closely. It’s always best to do these tasks early before the deadline However, if they do make it this far, don’t let them get any worse, stop them before they turn Black.
Black-Expectant
Think back to the beginning story. You’ve come across a group of injured patients from a horrific accident. There are people with a variety of injuries and you need to figure out who to help first and who to ignore. This is the hardest part.
A severed arm. Eviscerated abdomen Massive head trauma.
In a perfect world, these are the people that we should help first because they are at the most immediate risk of death. However, we have limited capabilities and resources, and we need to divert those towards those with the best chance of survival.
Unfortunately, there are some that we need to let go of, at least until more help arrives.
Now realize that every once in a while you may completely ignore something that you’ve known you needed to do for a while. You just kept putting it off and putting it off. You missed the deadline. You forget to send in the paperwork. You kept coming up with excuses and now it’s an uphill battle trying to recover. You need to know your priorities. Your resources, i.e. willpower, are finite, you cannot do everything. You need to allocate these precious commodities towards the tasks that are going to reap the largest benefit from your efforts.
The key is to never let a task progress this far. You need to be proactive and prevent things from escalating to Black, but if you fail to have the discipline to stop them from getting here, you must use your discipline to know when to cut your losses and aim your focus where it will be most effective.
***
By having a simple system that allows you to prioritize your tasks, it enables you to default into a routine of tackling them instead of relying on your finite willpower to sort them out every time.
Now you know, address the immediate problems and don’t lose control of them. After that, work you way back down the priority checklist and systematically remove these tasks from your to-do list.