How to prioritise when everything is urgent

You have twelve things to do and a short day, and every one of them arrives with a reason it cannot wait. Someone is waiting for it. It is late already. It will be worse tomorrow. All of that is true, and that is the problem. When every task is marked urgent, the word urgent no longer separates them.

So you do the task somebody asked about most recently, or the one at the top of your list, or the easy one you can finish in ten minutes. None of those is an order. It is only the task that reached you first.

Getting stuck here is not a bad attitude and it is not weak planning. It is a real limit. You are being asked to hold twelve tasks in your head at once and see how they all compare. Nobody can do that.

Almost every article about this gives you the same answer. Draw a square, cut it into four boxes, and ask two questions about each task: is it urgent, and is it important?

• Urgent and important: do it now.
• Important but not urgent: pick a time for it.
• Urgent but not important: give it to someone else.
• Neither: drop it.

It is a good idea, and those are the right two questions. It is named after Dwight Eisenhower, and you will find it in every list of ways to prioritise.

Here is where it stops. On the day you actually need it, the honest answer to both questions is yes for nearly everything. All twelve tasks land in the same box. The advice for that box is "do it now", so the boxes give you no help at all: one full box, three empty ones, and no order inside the full one. The four boxes sort your tasks. They do not order them.

There is a second problem, and it is quieter. The matrix asks you to judge each task on its own, against an idea of "important" that you have to hold in your head while you work down the list. That idea moves. By task nine you are using a different bar than you used for task two, and nothing tells you that you are.

The method on this page asks a different kind of question, and that is the whole difference between the two.

You can use both. The four boxes are useful for the tasks you should drop or give to someone else, and that is a real gain. What they cannot do is the part you are stuck on, which is the order of the tasks that are left.

The list is built one task at a time. For each new task:

1. It is compared with one task that is already placed.
2. Your answer removes half of the places it could go.
3. A few answers later only one place is left, and it goes there.

You never give a task a mark out of ten, and you never look at the whole list while you decide. You answer one small question at a time, and the order is what those answers add up to.

Every position comes from a pick you made. That is the difference between this and a list you moved around until it looked about right.

This will happen, and near the middle of the list it happens often. Two tasks, both urgent, and you do not prefer either one.

Do not ask which one is more important. That is the question you were already stuck on. Ask a smaller one:

What happens if this one waits until tomorrow?

Then ask it about the other task. One of the two answers is usually worse, and you normally know which one as soon as you say it. What happens next is easier to see than how important something is, because it is a real thing that happens to a real person on a real day.

PickChill has a short optional helper for a pair you cannot separate. It asks a few questions about how each option makes you feel, one at a time. It does not decide for you. Sometimes it tells you the two really are equal - and then either order is a good one.

Comparing every possible pair of eight tasks would be 28 questions. Placing each task one at a time takes about half of that, because every answer removes half of the places the task could still go.

The count also grows slowly. Each time your list doubles in size, a new task costs only about one more question.

A priority order is not something you make once. Next week brings six new tasks, three of the old ones are done, and the one that was second is now first.

That is why this is a list that stays open, not a run that finishes. A new task is placed with a few comparisons against the tasks already in the order, and the rest of the list is left alone. For a list of about ten tasks that is three or four questions. You never start again, and you never lose the order you built.

It is also why the first run is the long one. Everything after it is small.

Good for: your own work list at the start of a week. Which feature to build next. Which of the things you keep putting off to do first. Anything where you have too many tasks and they all look the same size.

Not for: being your task manager. PickChill does not hold your deadlines and it does not read your calendar. It answers one question, and only one: what order.

It is also not for a list where you only need the top one. That is a decision, and it takes far fewer questions - seven instead of about fifteen, for eight options.

And it is not a way to be told what to do. Every position is yours. Nothing is scored, nothing is judged, and the app has no opinion about your tasks. It knows nothing at all about your work, which is exactly why the order it gives you is your own.