Thursday, August 30, 2007

Priorities, Importance and the Value of Time

I'm not sure if there could be much more confusion than there is now about the use of the words 'priority' and 'importance' in personal productivity and time management. Much time management advice emphasizes determining goals and setting priorities.

Let me defer discussion of goals for another time.

The word 'priority' refers to two things, both of which are important in personal productivity. First, it can refer to the idea that things must be done in a certain order. The idea would be that first you would do things of the highest priority, then the next highest, etc. If something was of low priority it might never be done because there might always be other items of higher priority that were always 'jumping the queue' with their higher priority. These low priority tasks might be considered 'filler' work to do when there were no more important things to be done.

Second, 'priority' can be used synonymously with 'importance'. 'Importance' refers to something having high or situationally relevant value. For the most part we can have very intelligent discussions (possibly with ourselves) of the relative importance of tasks, without trouble. But the two senses of the word priority can cause lots of confusion.

The most potentially damaging one is the constant pressure to do the most important thing first. That is, because some task is 'high-priority' in the sense of 'high-importance', we treat it as if it automatically meant 'high priority' in the sense of first in the sequence of tasks to be performed. Sometimes the most important task really should be done first, of course. Emergencies or crises have to be dealt with immediately.

I would strongly that in your own thinking that you never use 'priority' as a synonym for 'importance'.

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