In my strolls around the web looking for more information about prioritizing with rocks and quadrants, I came upon this website devoted to managing time with your PDA. In just a handful of pages, Bruce Keener covers a lot of ground very effectively.
On his Prioritizing Tasks page he describes the paired comparison method, a technique I vaguely remember learning in school that could come in handy when you’re faced with a short list, a time budget and a case of indecision.
In this method, you rank everything on your list against every other thing (that’s why it’s good for short lists). So, you go down the list ranking the first item against every other one. Each “winner” gets a hash mark. When you’re done, you can quickly see which task got the highest ranking.
I wouldn’t use it as a major component of my system, but it can help circumvent overwhelm by forcing you to look at only two things at a time, instead of your whole list. And it can help you be more objective about those tasks, especially if the top rated one is a surprise to you.
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This reminds me of an argument I had with our vp sales. He was trying to show me that everything on his agenda is the "top priority" while I was trying to logically convince him that if one item gets to be the most important then another one obviously has to step down from the top priority. After arguing for more then an hour, we broke it off, never having convinced each other.
Posted by: Ohad | May 20, 2006 1:52 AM | Permalink to Comment