What if Everything’s a Priority?

As the metaphor demonstrates, the order in which you do things makes a difference. So the prioritisation pack might provide one answer to the question “what if everything is a priority?”. This is because it creates the idea that whilst everything might be a priority, they are not all equal in scale, size, or importance. The rice grain might be as important as one of the table tennis balls, but can be more easily fit in around the larger, more time consuming tasks. So anyone’s personal effectiveness in managing a range of equally important priorities might be in how they actually use time, in terms of it’s allocation and scheduling: what happens and when may not best be served by doing the most important or urgent task first…For example, suppose a priority task means visiting a client away from your office. You could do that first thing: it’s 9.00, and the traffic to and from the client might be busy, causing delay; going during the day means travelling there and back – also time expensive. But going there on the way home would be a one-way journey…So whilst it is a high priority, it may not be necessary to do it first. Scheduling can make a real difference.

For many, ‘urgent’ dominates the daily to do list. Tasks are prioritised in order of urgency. So time is allocated according to urgency – not importance (assuming we accept that the terms ‘urgent’ and ‘important’ are different). The prioritisation pack makes it clear that some smaller, less time consuming urgent tasks (marbles and grain) could be fitted in around the bigger, more important tasks (table tennis balls), and that starting with a load of small, urgent tasks might mean there is less room, if any, for the larger, more important ones.

As Chief Brody famously said in the movie ‘Jaws’, “you’re gonna need a bigger boat” – because the boat they were on well…just wasn’t big enough. And the same could be said for the prioritisation pack: maybe one solution to prioritising overload is to use a bigger container. What this means in reality is creating the extra space to allow for all priorities to be met – no matter how many balls, marbles and rice grains you have. And in some – perhaps exceptional – circumstances, this would be acceptable. But in reality, typically expanding to a bigger container would simply mean that – yes, you could get more done, but also you might over time realise that your work has expanded to fill whatever size container you’ve made available. At work, your initial, contracted daily 6-hour container has expanded to an 8, 10 or even 12-hour one…and the significant problem with that is - it is difficult then to return to a smaller container….

The ‘prioritisation pack’ is a brilliant example of a metaphor. Metaphors help explain ideas and relationships which are often complex and difficult to understand or convey in a way that makes them more accessible and easier to understand.