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Discussion on: How do you prioritize?

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Like Florent said in general. For go time:

  • Make lists of all items, on paper.
  • Prioritize the list by most important & doable (doable is important because undoable is demotivating & pointless). Rewrite neater.
  • Start at the top & knock out the list. Cross out with satisfaction. Put list in obvious place.
  • Spend the rest of the time doing whatever as reward (real incentive is better living not platitudes).
  • Ad new items, reorder or make more lists.
  • You can complete much more this way than checking commits, time tracking or whatever.
  • It's generally healthier as there is nothing to remember & your mind is clearer.
  • Simple, cheap, private, fast, anywhere, anytime, green (its not much paper for a lot of progress, there are sustainable options).
  • Helps focus on the stuff that matters.
  • Share by photo, typeout/ocr/email/hand/whatever.
  • Backups & stuff are not very important (a photo on a phone sent to yourself is an instant offsite digital backup).

Or trello, slack, gtd, build your own app (I have, didn't use), Evernote or one of millions of services. I use these if clients ask but it's all just overhead & distraction mostly if you actually measure. In certain (usually larger) use cases this stuff matters more but for the individual small team, the paper stuff works fast (immutable too, you can see edits).

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dbanty profile image
Dylan Anthony

Sounds like a very Kanban-ish way of managing work. I’ve been thinking about trying to move us in that direction. We’re a scrum shop but some of the structure actually gets in the way of picking the right tasks. Thank you

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vuild profile image
Vuild

Yw. I predate all those methodologies but different things work for different people/projects/
results/systems. Nothing is better really. A lot is overhead.

Test & measure outcomes or work across different tech.

Once you realize people who knew nothing made the things you think of as existing, you can make or use whatever you want, how you want. That tends to be what the next thing is, something odd now.

"what methodology do you use?"
"ninja fried cheese flips, kanban is so 2017"