Prioritasking

They say it’s stressful to live in today’s world. True, sometimes you feel swamped with work and you can’t cope with it efficiently. It can even get to the point when you start pulling out your own hair, and screaming in frustration. The concept I’ve come up with, which I’ve called prioritasking, may help you get all the threads in your hands, do things one at a time and still not miss deadlines. Image from nobody asked…

One of the most common problems people face when they try to get their affairs in order, to finish up their jobs and get into that blessed state in which they can solve problems as they come rather than have them pile up while they are doing something else, is that they realize that they are swamped with a vast variety of jobs which need to be completed. Some of those jobs have deadlines that are nearing closer by the minute. Others are jobs which demand that they be done right now and any delay may immobilize you completely. Both of these incapacitate your ability to go about doing your tasks systematically and pick them off one by one. The fact that by the day you get more and more tasks which need to be done one way or another makes it practically impossible to think that these tasks should be done one by one. For this reason we often take up what is called multitasking.

We begin doing things all at the same time. Or at least we attempt to do them all at the same time. Maybe we decide to sit down and be systematic about everything, so we come up with a plan. Three hours of task 1, two hours of task 2 … three hours of task n, where n is the number of tasks; follow this plan for m days and all our affairs will be in order. Then we’ll reach that blessed state I talked about earlier.

However, there is a problem. It doesn’t have to be us, we can have all the motivation in the world to go through with the plan. However, x < m days into our ultimate plan something happens, completely unexpected and we have to sort out a new problem. We lose 5 hours solving it. We think constantly about our plan and how we don’t have time for dealing with these unexpected matters and that we, in fact, have more important problems, such as getting to our blessed state. In any case, our plan is ruined. We can’t move everything a day ahead because we planned to finish most of those jobs by the time they need to be done (deadlines, remember?). In other words, our plan crumbles to dust and the rest of the days we spend working only on those jobs which have a deadline. All the other things are on hold.

By the time the deadlines are over, we already have more things with deadlines on our hands. We also have more tasks to do which have no deadlines. We sit, plan, and think nothing – NOTHING will stop us this time. But it does, because unexpected things happen all the time. And so we find ourselves in this circle where we work a lot, but rarely actually get anything done. Moreover, the piles of work we need to finish grow constantly. We eventually find we have no time to do anything other than this multitude of tasks.

We think that somewhere must be that magic plan that will resolve us of this constant cycle and give us more control. We try to think that maybe we need to simply not do some things which we think we need to do, but soon realize that these things are all too valuable to us to just abandon them. However, at this point we shouldn’t be looking at the magical ultimate plan; we should question our premises. What are our premises? That the way we are going about solving our tasks is the correct way. Is it? Is multitasking really possible to man? Can a person really do multiple things at the same time?

To answer this, let me turn to computers, which is where the concept of multitasking comes from. How do computers do it? Computers are excellent at multitasking. The fact that you’re reading this proves it. Just opening your browser involves the creation of a multitude of processes in the computer which the user is not aware of. Also, the CPU will constantly switch from executing one program to another, then back again, then to the third one, etc. (the pattern is generally unpredictable). Each time the computer does this switching, it does something that is called “saving context”. Saving context means placing all the data concerning the execution of the current process into memory. When the CPU decides to resume the execution of a certain process, it simply reads the previously saved context, and it’s all ready to continue with instruction execution. So, when switching processes in a CPU, it means first saving context of the current process, then reading context of the process to which the CPU is switching, and then working on this new process.

Switching processes in a computer literally saves the state of the CPU at that point in the execution of the process. This means writing the contents of several internal registers into memory. Reading context means reading the previously saved data back into registers. When the computer does that, it “knows” (so to speak) which instruction in the process is next in line for execution, and it “remembers” all the information which was vital to that process’ execution.

Now let us try and apply this concept on a human being. At the very thought of context saving we run into a problem. How do you “save” the state of your mind at a certain point of execution of a certain task? Do you take out a paper and pen and write it down? What do you write down? Your mind has no registers whose contents you need to copy. Your mind, in fact, does not work by following instructions. Working is a highly creative process, especially work which isn’t routine, and we constantly make up and refine our solution to a certain problem as we go about solving that problem – even when it’s all thoroughly planned (if the plan of how to solve a problem gives you absolutely no freedom in how to refine a solution it predicts, then the plan itself is already a solution to a problem; this is why instruction-executing entities will always be tools we use to solve our problems, rather than entities which actually solve problems). So, there is no hope of successfully saving the context of your own mind, unless you have an enviable ability to recall exactly what your state of mind was when you stopped solving this problem and switched to a different problem, and do the same for n different problems.

So, now we’ve dispensed with the concept of multitasking. What does that leave us with? Single-tasking! Doing one thing in a given period of time, from start to end. However, a thing that qualifies as a task needs to be somewhat better defined. Whatever you’re doing, you’re always doing some things aside. Brushing your teeth in the morning is one of those things. Going to work is another. Buying your kid a new pair of sneakers because he’s destroyed the old one is the third. Sleeping is one thing you need to do every day (although most people won’t complain about it). These are all some sort of tasks. However, they are all more or less automatic. We can do them while we are intellectually engaged in solving our problems at work, or at home, or wherever it is we have a bunch of work to do. It is exactly these kind of tasks – the non-routine tasks, into which we have to invest extra effort and extra thought, and might I say – extra time – that I’m talking about. These are the things we need to single-task while we perform the routine at the same time. It is our focus and attention which need to remain on one thing, and let the things which we can do without paying much focused attention to be done while we’re consciously elsewhere.

But, there is one big problem with this scheme. It is almost just as bad as multitasking. It could be even worse if unexpected things happen very often to us. What to do when, just as you’re writing a climax of a novel, your wife decides to give birth to a baby? You can’t leave her in labor until you’re done with the novel, can you? This is where I introduce to you the concept I called “prioritasking”. It is quite obvious which words make up this one, but let me mention them just the same. “Prioritasking” comes from the word “priority” and “tasking”; namely it’s single-tasking. It’s a single-tasking method, but improved in such a way that it recognizes your priorities. If you are doing thing A, which has a relatively low priority, and suddenly something happens and you have to do thing B which is of higher priority, then you start doing thing B. However, if you’re assigned to do thing C while doing thing A, and the deadline for thing C is, to make this simple example simple, 10 years from now and it’s about, say, learning how to mow grass more efficiently with this special new tool on the market, then you continue doing thing A regardless, and simply make a mental note on your To-Do list that you need to do thing C at some point in time as well.

Now, the tricky part about this method is assigning priorities to tasks. The example above (with your novel and becoming a father) may be trivial, but there are situations in which certain things seem to have equal priorities and you don’t know which to do first. Choosing priorities, however, is not the topic of this post and you will have to make due with what is already available on the Internet, or what you already know about it. But let’s assume, for the sake of me being able to continue explaining this topic, that you can choose your priorities well. When we suddenly need to perform a higher-priority task in the middle of the task we’re doing now, do we not have the same problem, as we do with multitasking, where we suddenly need to switch from doing thing A to doing thing B?

The short answer is – we are. However, we are happy with that because it pays to do it this way, because if you reevaluate our only alternatives – single-tasking and multitasking, prioritasking is much better. It is better than single-tasking because we are able to react quickly to unexpected things that happen to us in life, and it is better than multitasking, because even though we need to at some point switch from doing one task to doing another, we do not do this switching as often as we do while multitasking. This is a trade-off which we have no choice but to be happy with, unless we like pulling our hair out and scream with stress.

Even if you are a procrastinator, employing this method may lead to improvement. You may be a bit stressed out at first because you don’t think you’ll meet your deadlines. However, if you’ve chosen your priorities well, you should do much better than if you’ve chosen the path of multitasking, because multitasking will often lead – even with best of intentions – to no tasking at all.

Finally, here’s a couple of technical advice about prioritasking. If while you’re doing task A you’re interrupted by a higher priority task B, it would be nice if you simply jotted down task A as being incomplete. Stack your incomplete tasks. Each time you complete a task, simply fetch a task from the top of the stack and continue doing it. However, the problem will arise because some tasks have dynamic priority, i.e. yesterday they weren’t as urgent as they are today. This is why it would be wise to take the whole stack of problems at the start of the day in your hands and reshuffle it in such a way as to keep the task with the current highest priority on top of the stack. Do it every now end then, perhaps when you are taking a break. Just seing the tasks you need to do will make it easier for you to remember where you were when you start doing them again.

I like to come up with the title of each thing I need to do, which is informative to an extent, and when I stack it I write that title on a piece of paper and just put it on a pile which serves as a stack. So, what are you waiting for? Make the list of things you need to do, prioritize them, stack them up and get ready to rumble!