Low Priority Actions and the Butterfly Effect

When I used to work in an office in a large company,  I often made a to do list. I then looked at each item on my list and gave it a priority according to the following classification:

• Low
• Medium
• High
• Urgent

I then would start with my urgent to dos followed by my high to dos and so on down the priority list.

There is a problem with this approach. No matter how I arranged my list I was always hit by overwhelm – the vast amount of things on my list. I would read and re-read the list then consider my available time and think that there was no way that I could complete the list by the end of the week.

The difficulty  with low priority tasks is that they tend to be done after everything else had been completed – and if your time runs out then the low priority tasks may not be done at all.

The Getting Things Done approach to organizing your life, tackles both the priority problem and the overwhelm problem.  In later posts I’ll go into how this is achieved.

Getting Things Done means that you become more productive and efficient in your time management. Because of this many more of what would have been low priority tasks get done in a week.

By labelling a task as low priority it diminishes the task, gives it no importance, so therefore it does not matter if low priority tasks get done or not.  But how do you judge whether a task is important or not?

Often simple and straight forward tasks can have extremely beneficial effects that you cannot predict. For example, a courtesy call to announce a new service to a client who has done little business with your company, may result in that service being exactly what that client needs. The result: the client spends lots of money for your service and this significantly affects your profits for the current year.

There is something known as the Butterfly Effect which, simply put, says that small minute actions sometimes have significant effect on the outcome of a situation. An example of this is choosing to stand in the centre of the platform at a station rather than stand at the beginning or end. It seems unimportant what end of the platform you stand if the train is half empty. No matter where you sit you can get on the train and easily find a seat. So as an action, choosing where to stand, could be seen to be a low priority one.

The train arrives and you get on the middle carriage. All the seat rows have at least one person on them, so you sit down next to a woman, a complete stranger. By the end of the train journey you have chatted to the woman, then you go for a drink together, and six months later you find yourself  getting married to her. Would any of this have happened if you had stood at a different place on the platform?

The point of this story is to illustrate that you never really know the outcome of a given action until later. By neglecting the low priority actions you could be missing out on a wonderful opportunity in your life.

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