Prioritizing Under Pressure

I write on everything stress related. David Allen's GTD (Getting things done) is a de-facto productivity system that caters to prioritizing tasks based on their location on a quadrant. So, here we are inquiring whether GTD (Getting Things Done) is stress enabled or not.

If the priority of the task is high and is time-critical, we put it in Quadrant 1. Leave all else for now. We optimize for the turnaround time to be as less as possible. There can be multiple tasks equally significant and their priorities might collide. In that case, Round Robin scheduling can be applied to process all the activities in Quadrant 1 while preventing one task from hogging resource till completion.

Delegation can work in all sort of creative ways. A very trivial case is parallelizing the critical tasks and dedicating resources in or across teams. That way no body would be idle. Throughput and turnaround will be optimized with fairness in terms of the bigger picture. Depending upon the visibility, this strategy may simulate Round Robin as task submission proceeds. From perspective of the resources, they can focus on the task at hand and multi-tasking will be a non-issue result in lesser stress.

If the priority of the task is high and can't be squeezed in a certain time frame, we put it in Quadrant 2. Important but not time sensitive. For-example, you are tasked to explore and compare the best option for the company's working facility. Super important, requires setting up parameters and then seeing where any given option is placed. Regular progress is expected and the factor throughput will be reined in when we have unbounded but vital tasks. With tasks in Quadrant 2, resources get the leeway to schedule as per their needs.

The judgement, where a task belongs, and how it shifts quadrants as per evolving scope, is highly critical. It's an ongoing challenge, requires insight into how we can design services that are seamless from customer's perspective with the best utilization of resources. In case a task becomes resource intensive, delegation and visibility becomes of paramount importance.

A simple filing system may dedicate a tray to each quadrant with tasks in a tray getting prioritized in a simultaneous fashion. One can resolve priorities within the tray as well and dedicate quanta as per weight-age.