Priorities are Misleading

One of the traditional ways of managing workload is to organize tasks based on their priority. Tasks of high priority make their way up the work pile, and tasks of low priority sink down to the bottom of the pile.

The rationale behind this is that if you spend your time attending to the tasks with high priority, you will be able to make better use of your time and get better results than spending time on tasks with little return.

While there is a lot of truth to this, it’s not the whole truth.

Priority is Relative

The first fact we have to acknowledge about priorities is that they are relative. A high priority task must be done prior to (i.e. before) low priority tasks. You judge the priority level of each task compared to all other tasks.

Although this seems sensible at first, but consider what will happen when you always have high priority tasks taking up all your attention, while low priority tasks go unnoticed at the bottom of the pile.

You might think: “Who cares! They’re low priority tasks, anyway!”

Which brings us to our second point…

Priority and Importance

Priorities make you assume that low priority tasks are of little importance, and can be ignored as long as you are getting high priority tasks done. But as we’ve already pointed out, relative to high priority tasks, low priority tasks are of lesser importance.

This does not mean that they are not important. They may not be important, but since they made their way to your work load, there is a likelihood that you need to get them done.

By continuously working on high priority tasks, you may be completely ignoring low priority tasks, and the consequences aren’t always pretty.

Priorities and Catastrophes

Given the fact that organizing tasks based on priority is relative, and that all tasks you have consciously taken on are important, neglecting low priority tasks may evolve into catastrophes.

One way this can happen is when the deadline for a low priority task may have been encroaching on you without you being aware of it, since you were too busy working on high priority tasks.

This isn’t to say that you should ignore task priority, but that priority should not be your only consideration.

Your entire workload should be put into a system that aims to get all work done, rather than risk ignoring tasks that are important, but may be filtered out from the perspective of priority.