Monday, October 10, 2011

Holiday Priorities

As I write, today is a public holiday. Everybody is on vacation, except me. I’m at work.

Since 1970 I’ve taken options to work on a public holiday and then take a day off when the shops are open. I slept in this mooring, rising after 9 a.m. and I sit down and realize that:-

(a) Today is Monday and I didn’t pre-post my 6 posts for this blog (I post them in advance now, and let them time-release during the week)

(b) Yesterday I did not spend the time working through a week’s accumulation of interesting-links-for-other-blogs

(c) Danny has emailed me a specific failure in one of my applications and

(d) There’s a backlog of personal email to be tackled.

That will do for now; you know what I’m talking about when I say “Four urgent tasks”.

Question is, how to assign a priority to each task; it’s a given that once I start a task I’m going to see it through to conclusion, but which task comes FIRST.

To my mind the best bet is the task that seems to offer the earliest completion. I don’t know what I’ll uncover with Danny’s bug; it could be a five-minute task, it could extend to a four-hour slog through code. But I know that releasing 6 Torontopreneur posts into the wild will take me 20 minutes, tops.

So that’s my urgent task this morning.

I can deal with any personal email within 3 minutes, even to the extent of muttering “There, there, what a pity; please tell me more”, so that’s second.

Danny comes third. It has to be done.

Fourth is wading through “clippings” file and drafting a blog item for each, doing a bit of research, finding or making an image and so on.

Is this the correct sequence? I’ll not know until the end of this day; but I do know that if I don’t set a sequence by priority, I’ll waffle.

Talk to Me !

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