I started to write journals a year ago to think and explore random ideas in my head. At one point, I realized that I wrote a lot of pages related to prioritization. I don’t fully realize the need for prioritization until I become a manager. It seems that even today, prioritization is still a puzzle for me. So I use this page to explore all the ideas in my head and from readings, and potential solutions.

Running out of time and energy budget. In my 20s, I was eager to learn to develop all kinds of skills needed for work or life. At work, the more I learn, the more capabilities of doing stuff I have, which means a larger scope, which means the bigger probability I will encounter new stuff and learn more. Learning is a compound and reinforced process. In life, with time, people tend to develop more hobbies and interests because of curiosity and seeking instinct, or because they develop all kinds of life skills in general, which enable them to do or explore more. This is especially true as people progress their careers. One starts to have income and enables them to do more things that they couldn’t do in the past, like expensive hobbies, e.g. traveling, skiing. Besides, establishing a new family and having kids take another big portion of people’s life. In short, with an increased scope at work, accumulated hobbies, interests, enabling more stuff with increased salaries, and taking more responsibility of a new family and familiar member, people tend to run out of the budget or time and energy.

“While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want. Life is like a giant smorgasbord with more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want to get other things that you want or need even more. Some people fail at this point before they have even started. Afraid to reject a good alternative for a better one, they try to pursue too many goals at once, achieving few or none of them. Don’t get discouraged and don’t let yourself be paralyzed by all the choices. You can have much more than what you need to be happy. Make your choice and get on with it.” Principles, P172, - Ray Dalio

Feeling achieving nothing. Switching from an individual contributor (IC) to pursue a manager’s path is not a good experience at the very beginning, it’s not because of the changes of the scope and responsibilities I had to take and developed skills around that, but because all kinds of “requests” from others, not handling that well brought a lot of stress on myself. Mainly it’s due to the tendency to respond and resolve the request immediately, it’s a very reactive approach. It’s not an approach at all, I just react to requests, there’s no strategy. At the end of each day, it seems like I’m quite busy all day long and get a lot of things done, but feel like I have done nothing. The issue results from balancing the IC work and managerial work in the first six months. The transition is a real struggle. Even though I made it clear to my manager that we would lose one of the top productive engineers, which is me, if I pursue the manager’s track, we agreed that it’s fine and beneficial to the team and me in the long term. Even with that kind of self-awareness and official manager title, it’s hard to drop all the IC’s work once. In hindsight, it’s because of the IC work momentum I developed in the past many years.

I didn't realize all the struggle until after six months or a year because I was so close to the circumstances. Even though I know I need to change and I also got advice, e.g. using a TODO list and prioritizing them often, it's hard to put it into practice. I had been struggling with it for a while until I started to take some action. The pain forced me to take action, e.g. experiment with new ways how I manage work or reading to learn how others solve the problems. In hindsight, reading helps me a lot, experiment and adaptation¹ indeed is the best learning strategy. I started to write down how I manage my day and develop my ways of management of work and life.

The experience of focusing. One of the reasons for feeling achieve nothing is that I feel achieved a lot of being an IC in the past where that type of work is very concrete and having clear goals, e.g. deliver a project or fix bugs, it’s relatively easy to see the results and progress. In another angle, in the early stage of my career, even in the past few years, I was so focused on work, no leisure time, no traveling, worked tons, in years, but I got a lot of things done, learned a lot and grew rapidly. I haven’t experienced such a focus for this long before, I’m not sure I can say I enjoyed it, I appreciated the effort I did and the sacrifice I made. I think I know the answer to the topic of this page at the beginning, I think I just need to re-discover it. Because the circumstances have changed and a lot of things are not clear.

“Focusing is about saying no.” Many people, including myself, tend to say yes because I want to make people around me happy. But the problem is that saying yes means I have to commit to doing something later. This creates a problem, I’ll have a lot of tasks to do in the near future. Which means I have to prioritize hard and potentially work hard. I just put a lot of stress on myself. At a certain point, I just cannot finish all the tasks and requests. Then I have to apologize and help to figure out other ways to solve the problems. But sometimes some people, either myself or others, have to stay up late to get the work done because the not-urgent task becomes an urgent one. This situation can be avoided by planning if I can say no to it early on. In short, saying yes without thoughtful thinking can create a time and energy cost and big problem later for yourself but also others. It’s always better to give thoughtful consideration by mentioning that you need some time to weigh your current priority and workload or figure out an alternative to handle the request better. It will benefit both sides.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I”m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” - Steve Jobs

Have a goal/task list. It seems so obvious before you can prioritize, to some sort of a list to track tasks that potentially need to be done, either in life or work. At work, there will be a task/project list. You probably experience that at a time you can not even remember what you are trying to do, only when you take some effort to think, and you recall what you’re trying to do. That’s the “flaw” of the brain. It tends to be effortless and tends to forget things that are not important. Or things are important, but you feel that that’s not important. Then you lose the opportunity to iterate on it and increase the meaning of working on it so you can work on it later. That’s why you need a TODO or task list, whatever you call it. You will never forget to do anything.

You will never miss anything if you have so many things to work on. Whenever you have something you want to do, add it to your TODO.
It’s super useful when you receive some request when you focus on working on something. It’s generally a good idea to take a few seconds to triage and put it on the list and continue to finish your work at hand. Most of the time, it’s a bad idea to react to the request. Because a question can lead to another question, you will be distracted by other things that can be done later. And you didn’t finish your goal.
Also, be aware of how tasks in the TODO list contribute to your long-term goal. In other words, it has to include the task for your medium or long-term goal.

“Ruthless Prioritization means only doing the very best of the ideas. Lots of times you have very good ideas but they’re not as good as the important thing you could be doing and you have to make the hard choices. Sometimes people think of prioritization as only doing things that will have a positive impact on your business but prioritization is a higher order than that, prioritization means doing the best things for your business. So what does it mean for small businesses? It means leveraging the power of where people are making the shift to mobile if you want to find new customers, figuring out if there are 10 things on your list and you can’t do all 10 well, doing the top five really well. “ by Sheryl Sandberg

Ruthlessly prioritize

Prioritize the goals. Have a clear few goals.
Build a list of tasks around those goals.
Use 80/20 rules. It’s easier said than done. I think those two articles ²³ demonstrate clear steps on how to do it.
Keep the list short to focus. e.g. no more than 20 items. Cut distractions from the list.
Put strategic tasks first.
Prioritize regularly, daily, and weekly. Weekly prioritization is focusing on middle to long-term tasks and goals.
Be aware that the easy but not important task tends to be done early which leaves no time and energy to tackle the challenging task.
Commit to getting it done. If a task is not done, in x days or weeks, remove it because it seems not important to you. If it’s important, plan and get it done early.

In practices

In my practice, there are a few daily tasks that are very important to me: writing a daily journal to think, running to meditate and for health, reading for learning people’s perspectives, and inspiration. They are the must-do tasks in the long term under any circumstances. There are some cases, for example, while traveling, I still try to do them all, sometimes it’s hard to complete them all, but running is a must-do task.

So this kind of focus and commitment brings the achievement that I ran 19,000 miles in the last 8 years. I started writing a journal last year, 200k characters in total by the end of last year. Two months have passed, and I got more than 100k characters so far this year. This year, I decided to read more, so I’m reading at least 1 hour per day. I'm reading my sixth book now (March) this year.

I have a weekly plan document to capture high-level sub-goals or milestones which will contribute to my long-term life and work goals. I have a prioritized TODO list and capture all the granular tasks I need to do to achieve the goals in the weekly plan document. I have a habit of planning the second day's work at the end of each day and also spend 5-10 minutes reviewing and adjusting the plan and priority. I noticed that end-day planning can reduce some sort of stress because I think my subconscious thinks that I know what I expect for tomorrow and have more control, just like doing a little bit of planning or work on Sunday will significantly reduce the stress on Sunday. Morning planning is important, where I set one or two goals/focus on important tasks of the day. No matter what, I’ll get something done and I’ll progress.

Ruthless Prioritization

Ruthlessly prioritize

In practices

Readings

Footnotes