prioritise

How Warren Buffett prioritises his To Do list

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If I haven’t said this to you before, let me say it now: I can’t stand systems for prioritising your work. The time you spend fiddling with your list is time you could spend doing the work. And the most fantastically well worked out priority list is torpedoed the next time anyone phones or emails you with a more urgent task.

But writer James Clear is well into priorities and says that investor Buffet is too:

With well over 50 billion dollars to his name, Warren Buffett is consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world. Out of all the investors in the 20th century, Buffett was the most successful.

Given his success, it stands to reason that Buffett has an excellent understanding of how to spend his time each day. From a monetary perspective, you could say that he manages his time better than anyone else.

And that’s why the story below, which was shared directly from Buffett’s employee to my good friend Scott Dinsmore, caught my attention.

Let’s talk about the simple 3-step productivity strategy that Warren Buffett uses to help his employees determine their priorities and actions

Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities — James Clear via Medium (27 October 2014)

I’d like you to read the full piece as Clear writes it well, but a small spoiler is that he recounts this tale of Buffet going through his three-step priority process. Go read it, though, and tell me that it’s really prioritising.

I think it’s getting stuff sorted out before you start. I don’t take away from this that I must study my To Do list’s priority rankings.

Don’t prioritise tasks, ignore people instead

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The most contentious element of The Blank Screen productivity books and workshop are to do with prioritising tasks and specifically how I really believe you’re wasting your time. While he has more to say than this, here’s a fella who puts that point thisaway:

When faced with potentially overwhelming demands on our time, we’re often advised to “Prioritize!” as if that’s some sort of spell that will magically solve the problem. But what I’ve learned in the process of helping people cope with and manage their workflow is that prioritizing accomplishes relatively little, in part because it’s so easy to do. Let’s define the term: Prioritizing is the process of ranking things—the people who want to take up our time, items on our to-do list, messages in our Inbox—in order of importance. While this involves the occasionally difficult judgment call, for the most part it’s a straightforward cognitive task. When looking at a meeting request, a to-do list, or an email we have an intuitive sense of how important it is, and we can readily compare these items and rank-order them.

Here’s the problem. After we prioritize, we act as though everything merits our time and attention, and we’ll get to the less-important items “later.” But later never really arrives. The list remains without end.

The Most Productive People Know Who to Ignore – Ed Batista, Fast Company (20 August 2014)

My argument is that we’re writers, usually working freelance or for more many editors, and the moment you’ve got your lovely list all prioritised up is the moment when one of those people phones you with an emergency. But Batista’s full piece goes on specifically to say that we need to be a bit callous about who we do and don’t pay attention to. He maintains that that our work is done when there are “no truly important people” waiting on us. And then:

[W]hen you read the phrase, “no truly important people,” above, you probably flinched a little and thought it was somewhat callous. I flinch when I read it, too, and I wrote it! But this understandable response is exactly why we devote time and attention to people who don’t truly merit the investment. There’s a fine line between effective triage and being an asshole, and many of us are so worried about crossing that line that we don’t even get close.

He goes on to explain his reasoning in much more detail and also to provide specifics about why and how to do this but let me summarise: there are just people with demands on your time that you do not care about.

Harsh but true. So accept that you’re more fussed about this person or that client and work to get what they need done.

That’s not to say you can or should be rude to everyone else, mind: it’s nice to be smart but it’s smart to be nice.