Priorities considered harmful
Do or don’t…
Read more…

@All: Please use the feedback page.

Priorities considered harmful

“Will you implement low/medium/high priorities?”, people ask us.
Even though all the other apps do it - ZinZen® won’t - and for good reason.

Why?

Priorities hide the hard truth from you - till it’s too late

Setting priorities doesn’t tell you what is realistic. It is mostly wishful thinking. Just because you mark something ‘high prio’ doesn’t mean it will get done. If you have enough high priorities you’ll eventually fail to meet your own high standards. This also ‘crowds out’ medium priorities. Low priorities, at this point, are then just pointless. Remove them from your list as unrealistic. But how many of your medium and high priority goals are also unrealistic? No way to know… All you have is ambition… and eventually - disappointment.

Priorities make it hard to separate urgent from important

Should all ‘high priority’ stuff be urgent as well as important? High priority generally means “drop everything” and focus only on this. When juggling multiple metaphoric balls in the air - your highest priority is not always the ball that’s closest to the ground. That one is definitely urgent - but it might be more important to focus on the balls that are worth saving rather than drop all your balls in a heroic but stupid attempt to save that single ‘lost cause’ ball.
So then what happens to the stuff that’s only urgent, or long-term but important? Should you never do those? Do we let them age and/or slowly increase their importance until they become urgent and important? Does this mean we are always firefighting? How can we ever be in a ‘good’ place and feel ‘in control’ this way?

ZinZen®’s approach to priorities

There are only two priorities:

  • I’ll do this
    Block time on my calendar whenever - but before the deadline.
  • I won’t do this
    Remove this goal from my todo’s.

Wishing you all the best!



This post is part of a series:

Please help improve ZinZen®:

Comments

Post comments anonymously via this feedback form