Friday, February 10, 2012

Assigning Priorities

Do you have a To Do list? Are jobs assigned priorities: urgent, medium, low? Do you ever receive emails with an angry red exclamation mark denoting high priority? If the answer is yes then you'll understand the feeling that anything marked urgent should be ignored. If someone rudely wants you to drop everything and help them then instantly because they have some deadline then how can they know whether you also have a deadline. And if it's urgent, why didn't they ask you 24 hours ago before it became urgent? Their slackness in waiting till the last moment has contributed to this situation. So the solution is to completely ignore anything urgent or high priority. After all, the deadline is so close that it will soon pass and then there is no point in responding at all. Even if the request came from yourself, don't stress. Make a hot chocolate and sit down. Nobody will die,(unless you're working in casualty or piloting a plane).

Similarly, any job marked low priority can safely be forgotten. Why even bother mentioning it if it's low priority I wonder. Preserve those precious electrons by not writing it in an email; save those molecules of graphite in your pencil.

That leaves medium priority. This is where all your attention should be. But fortunately, having excluded the urgent stuff, the medium priority stuff can wait.


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