Who Said It's Important to "Prioritize" Tasks?

As I wrote in my article the other day, I've been quite busy with work lately, and my tasks are piling up. So, I'm struggling with how to process that massive amount of work.

When I'm truly busy, I often think lately that the very meaning of "prioritizing" disappears.

Generally, it is often said that the important thing in work is to prioritize. They say that the success or failure of a job depends on the planning of "what to start with." There is certainly some truth to that.

However, if you prioritize, you end up starting with the most urgent things, and a large number of tasks get pushed to the back burner. When that happens, other problems can arise because those back-burnered tasks have stagnated.

Also, there is the issue of what criteria you use to decide those "priorities." In the end, since you are the one selecting the tasks, there is a possibility that you are just unconsciously cherry-picking them. It often happens that you are just putting off tasks that you find burdensome.

Suppose there are 100 tasks in total, and 10 of them are time-consuming and troublesome. In this case, you tend to have the psychology of finishing the 90 lighter ones first and then tackling the 10 troublesome ones later. But in reality, while you are finishing those 90, new tasks keep coming in, causing confusion.

When the volume of tasks is truly high, things can get out of hand, and you might end up suffering later because of "tasks that were left too long." Fortunately, I haven't had that become a major problem very often, but when you prioritize and do things out of order, inconveniences tend to arise.

They tell you in new employee training to "prioritize your work," but I think actual work isn't that simple. Prioritizing makes the process complicated, so it's not something you can do, at least not when you don't have any breathing room.

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A while ago, in a YouTube video by game director Masahiro Sakurai, there was an episode about his way of thinking regarding the "order of supervision."

Because of his position as a director, Sakurai is asked to supervise by every member of the team, and he handles them, but it seems he uses email to receive those requests. And he has a system where he supervises them in the order they come in, first-come, first-served.

This means he doesn't prioritize, but simply does things in the order they arrived chronologically. This way of thinking has become the basis for my own approach.

Although I'm not quite at Sakurai's level, I get dozens of emails and chats every day, so I used to pin the ones I had to deal with and prioritize them. However, that led to the situation where low-priority items were never touched.

Currently, I am honestly "doing them one by one in order." If I have to do it anyway, I'll do it the moment I see it. If it's something I don't need to do or should delegate to someone else, I take it off my plate.

In the end, there is the benefit that tasks don't stagnate by dealing with them in order. It might take some time before I start on them, but in a sense, it means I start on them equally.

Also, for emails and chats, it is most efficient to judge and respond the moment you see them. If you put them on hold once, the work of reading and understanding them again increases, which is inefficient.

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That said, there are exceptions, as I do handle truly urgent matters urgently. Other than that, for any task, I basically clear them out one after another in order of age.

When I get busy, I generally have to be conscious of this to keep things running. Today, too, I will continue to handle the tasks that keep coming in one after another.