When You Fail to Prioritize Prioritizing

Research shows (see for instance Your Brain at Work) that prioritizing is one of the most advanced brain functions, and a huge energy suck. In other words, we use the most recently evolved (and therefore energy-inefficient) parts of our brains, and it is hard work.

On the other hand, prioritizing doesn't feel like work at all. It feels like metawork that produces zero output. If you use workflow ideas like GTD, you know it takes significant creativity to look at the stuff in your inbox, recognize what they mean, and decide what to do about each item, and then pick one to process. Not prioritizing the whole darn list. Just picking one is hard.

Which means you should reserve your highest energy/top-gear brain time for prioritizing. For your weekly GTD review if you can produce that energy state reliably at the same time every week. But it can feel like a waste of your best brain time. You feel like you should be writing, coding or composing music with your best time, not processing to-do lists.

But look at the cost of what happens when you don't. You randomly and ineffectually stab at whatever pushes your buttons in one of your myriad inboxes (desk, email, computer desktop, kitchen counter, mail stack...). You can't get motivated because deep down you realize you are working to be working rather than working on what is most important.

On the other hand, you can go too far. If about 5% of your 80 hours/week uptime (including your work week plus unaccounted for extracurricular processing) is seriously good brain time, that's about 4 hours of peak-performance time. If your life is messy and complicated enough, all four of those hours can go towards prioritizing and "weekly review" activities, leaving much poorer-quality brain time available for actually working.

This is fine if you are a manager, and your main job is prioritizing and organizing work for other people to do. It is not fine if you want a good part of your output to be your own creative, finished, output. So if you find yourself trying to blog/code/paint etc. with your fifth/sixth/seventh most creative hours in a week, you are in trouble. You should be dropping commitments all over the place so your meta-work time squeezes into, say, 1 hour.

I don't think any modern adult information worker can get it to below 1 hour/week though.