Mini Blog Post 17: Prioritisation Part 2/2 - Achieving Goals
(This is a continuation of post 16, I recommend reading that one first)
So, after yesterday’s post, we know that prioritisation is incredibly important, and we’ve found some goals. This post is going to be about how to approach choosing actions that best achieve our goals. This is an incredibly hard problem - the world is complex and uncertain, and your goals are complex. There is no magic formula for finding the right answer here. And it’s emotionally hard to make the decisions, even if you know they’re the right call - good prioritisation will require painful trade-offs, because the world is full of far too many awesome things and you can’t do all of them. This is something I majorly struggle with. But I hope to be able to outline some tools, mindsets and common pitfalls to help get started.
Being prepared to prioritise
The first bottleneck is getting into the mental state where you can think about prioritisation and genuinely act upon your decisions. And this is super, super hard! Thinking about trade-offs, realising that you can’t do everything, realising that the world is fundamentally uncertain, are all difficult. And your intuitions don’t dissolve just because you realise they’re holding you back. There’s a reason that almost everyone is terrible at prioritisation.
I’m going to outline some of the common emotional problems I run into, and my best tools for dealing with them - this is highly personal, and will not perfectly transfer! I encourage you to try these, discard what doesn’t work and keep what does, and ultimately find a toolkit that works for you.
It’s really hard to give up on things.
For example, I easily fall into the trap of having a self-image of a dedicated student. This means I take too many courses, and am a bit over-worked, and know on some level that I’m stretching myself thin. But it’s hard to drop something. It feels like giving up, not being good enough.
But this is clearly the right decision for me. Each course consumes a lot of time, and I miss out on other things I could be doing with that time, and on the ability to focus more on other courses.
The underlying problem is that there are opportunity costs - I am losing the “best possible thing I could be doing with this time” in exchange for an extra course. But the course feels salient, while the “best possible alternative” feels abstract. And abstract things are less emotionally compelling
This is the illusion of doing nothing
But “abstract” vs “concrete” lives in my mind, not in the world. So the solution to this is to make the “best possible alternative” concrete
In this example, I can track my time to figure out how long the course is taking me, and then plan out exactly what I’ll do with that time. Projects I can pursue, friends I can see, time I can take to relax, time to consolidate other courses. This dissolves the asymmetry, and makes the choice feel far more obvious!
For time tracking, I highly recommend using Toggl
You can’t do everything
A related problem - intuitively, everything feels like it should be easy. It doesn’t feel like I need to give up a project, because giving up is painful! And surely I can just do everything?
Note: This problem may be more specific to me - I see this less often in others
I notice this when I have an upcoming deadline - I feel stressed about it, but this rarely translates into actions, because it always feels like I can just do things
This is, clearly, empirically false. And so the solution is to convince my intuitions of this
The best solution I’ve found to this is to practice making accurate time estimates for myself
I currently estimate what I can get done in each pomodoro, each day, and each week, and calibrate at the end of each how well it went
This is not an accountability device, it’s solely to track my progress + calibrate my intuitions better - I often feel like I had a super focused session, but only achieved half of my goal - this shows the goal was bad.
I’m still pretty awful at this. But the resulting tight feedback loops, ability to look at base rates and calibration have given me much better intuitions, and made this feel much more salient to me.
This is the underlying fault beneath my perfectionism - it feels salient to leave work unfinished and unpolished, and the time I spend on that polishing doesn’t feel like it really has cost.
Tracking time for blog posts has helped for this - I spent > 6 hours editing my first blog post, and this felt fine at the time. But I now know that I could have written 3-4 rougher posts from scratch in that time - opportunity costs are real!
Giving up on things
A key skill of prioritisation is changing my mind when I get new information - being willing to change my actions, and give up on previous things if they stop being my highest priority. And this is hard!
This often manifests as the sunk cost fallacy - when you’ve already invested a bunch of time and effort into an option, you feel attached to that. Even if that task should no longer be your highest priority, it feels painful to give up on it.
The underlying error, for me, is that the invested time and effort doesn’t currently feel like a cost, but will if I give up on the task - this is purely a fact of mental accounting, but makes the decision to give up feel much higher cost than it is.
Note that you shouldn’t ignore sunk costs! If you’re invested a lot into a project, it takes much less additional effort to finish it. And the question is, “is the additional benefit of finishing this worth the additional effort it’ll take, given what I now know?”
There are also switching costs - you should be biased away from giving up too easily. I just think most people (including me!) err too far this way/
For me, this often manifests as completionism - there’s a strong draw to having something feel finished. Yet I’m often doing a task in order to learn from it, not for the results. At least half of why I write posts is to clarify my ideas. I do problem sheets to understand the concepts better. And I often get most of this benefit at the start of the process, rather than the end, but I feel a strong attachment to the idea of completion
The main solution I have to this is the slightly silly “teleporting alien” thought experiment. Distance yourself from your current situation, and imagine that you’re an alien mind, that’s just teleported into your body. It has all of your resources, and all of your goals, but no attachment to your previous actions - after all, somebody else did those, so you can’t blame the alien! What seems like the right decision now?
Making time for it
Prioritisation is, fundamentally, about trading time for information - information about your goals, future actions and priorities. This is hard, because information is abstract
This makes it difficult to prioritise prioritisation - it feels wrong to take time for it!
Note that this is very obviously wrong - extremely competent and busy people still make time for prioritisation. It is valuable.
Undervaluing abstract things is a super common human bias, this is not an area where your intuitions are a good guide.
This is especially insidious if you already feel busy and overwhelmed - it might be more important to zoom out and properly plan and prioritise, if you’re busy with important tasks, but it feels unnecessary and wrong.
I find it hard to get over this on an emotional level. My main solution is to carve out a regular time in my schedule for reviewing my week and prioritising, and ensuring this feels sacrosanct - I will not deviate from this routine, no matter how much of a good idea this seems in the short term.
By making this no longer feel like a decision, it’s less painful. And on a meta level, I’m confident this is the right decision.
After all this talk about the difficulty of prioritisation, it’s easy to fall into the trap of guilt and obligation. Prioritisation feels like a thing you need to do. And unpleasant chore that holds you back from really enjoying life.
Yet, prioritisation is fundamentally about achieving your core values. It is the thing furthest from an external obligation that you could ever encounter. Prioritisation is about finding the parts of yourself that most hold you back, and giving yourself the strength to overcome them
And if you can really internalise that prioritisation is awesome, that will go far further than trying to tackle any of the resistances directly
A trick I find useful: It’s easy to spend a lot of my life doing things that feel urgent, but don’t bring me closer to my long term goals. Think back on your last week, or month. How many things did you do that felt important, but you no longer really care about? How much time responding to emails, doing mindless busywork, or pointless admin? How many of the things you did a year ago do you now feel hyped about?
For me, and I think most people, this number is a lot lower than it could be. And this is outrageous. I want to spend as much time as I possibly can doing things that make me feel happy and fulfilled. And internalising the ideas of prioritisation is the first step in this direction.
How to prioritise
So, even if you’re now fully pumped about prioritisation, and have your goals in mind, it’s pretty unclear how to get started. And prioritisation is hard. There’s no magic formula, or single trick that will solve the problem. We live in a fundamentally uncertain world, and need to learn to deal with this. And different situations will require different tools. But here are the tools I’ve found most useful:
Be grounded
One of the easiest mistakes to make with prioritisation is to fail to be grounded in your terminal goals. There is a lot of nuance with how to do this, but the first step is to ask yourself “is what I’m doing bringing me closer to my true goals?”
And if it isn’t, this is a big deal. The first step to achieving your goals is to try.
A useful experiment: Do heavy time tracking for the next week - use a tool like Toggl and keep track of how you actually spend your time. And at the end of the week, label all of that time according to which high-level goal (if any) that time was helping you work towards. Is that number as high as you want it to be?
Back-chaining is a key tool for doing this well, and remaining grounded in your true goals
Look at scale
Prioritisation is hard, but some decisions are obvious, even if they don’t feel that way. If you notice something in your life that you don’t think about enough, do a rough estimate of how valuable fixing that could be
If you’ve never tried before, Fermi Estimates are a valuable skill to practice
For example - I’ve recently been experimenting with having a good home office environment - a good chair, standing desk, etc. Because I did a rough estimate of how much I’d pay to avoid lower back pain later in life, and the probability of developing it, and this was obviously a thing I should prioritise
Similar reasoning applies to exercise, sleep, nutrition, investing in friendships and relationships, etc
Similarly, I should spend a lot of time optimising things I’ll do for a long time, like career choice. Think about how many hours of your life that decision will impact
Humans are bad at long-term thinking, and we lack a good intuition for large numbers. But if you understand that, you can learn when to overrule your intuitions and do better
Equally, don’t sweat the small stuff! Prioritisation takes time and effort, it’s genuine cognitive labour. If you do an estimate of how big a deal it is, and it’s pretty small, it’s not worth your time.
Hamming Problems
Another way to think about scale is by searching for Hamming Problems - the biggest problems, or bottlenecks in your life.
This is a useful worksheet for thinking through your Hamming problems
Often identifying these can make it obvious that they should be priorities, because they underlie everything else
Getting started
It’s easy to be overwhelmed, and feel paralysed by uncertainty and indecision. This is reasonable, but can often mean you wildly overestimate the difficulty, and give up before you’ve begun
I find it can be useful to set a 5 minute timer, and to make myself spend the full 5 minutes thinking through the problem - sometimes I solve it in this time, I almost always get started and feel less confused. And even if I get nowhere, I’ve only lost 5 minutes. But taking a small step to get started is key to telling how hard the problem really is.
It’s often good to start by brainstorming possible options for 5 minutes - it’s so easy to limit your thinking, and miss out on important options, or not think of options at all!
Think things through systematically
Prioritisation is hard, and a lot of it will come down to your intuitions. It’s easy to not think through a problem properly, and miss a lot of important details
One solution to this is to do an intentionally shitty cost-benefit analysis:
Make a table with a row for each option, and a column for each important factor.
Go through and fill out each cell, eg rating it out of 5.
Then give each factor a coefficient, according to how important it is, take the total, and sort!
And, now the process has given me an answer, throw it all away and go with my new gut feel
I am a big fan of this approach - it resolves paralysing uncertainty by giving something concrete to do. And at the end of it, I’ve been forced to think through the different examples systematically, and through all the important factors. This often points to things I was missing before, and means my intuition is now far better calibrated.
Seek advice
Prioritisation is hard. And one efficient solution to hard problems, is to outsource some of the cognitive work to other people!
Seek out mentors, and people with more life experience, and ask their thoughts
Ask for common mistakes, and failures to prioritise too!
Try to gain their models, not just their preferences and opinions. The question is what should I do, not what they would do. It’s pretty easy for mentors to commit the Typical Mind Fallacy too
Just talking to friends can be incredibly useful - making your thoughts concrete, and weighing up the pros and cons does a lot of the work of prioritisation. Getting them to sanity check you, and point out blind spots.
Some people feel a lot of social resistance to this - I find most friends will be happy to help if you explicitly say “I’m struggling with a decision, can you help me clarify my thoughts”. If this is a service you can also give them, both people win!
Getting thoughts out of your head
It’s easy to get caught up in fuzzy spirals of over-thinking, which never go anywhere. Getting thoughts out of your head is valuable, and helps to significantly clarify things. This is a lot of the value of talking things through with a friend!
This can often be replicated by just putting your thoughts on paper, or talking to a rubber duck
A major failure mode is to fail to be concrete. It can be good to pick out specific options, and explore exactly what you think they’d be like, and what the consequences would be. A surprising amount of the time this will highlight key uncertainties, or that an option is obviously dumb/amazing.
Explore
Often the best way to prioritise is to try things! Go out into the world, gain information, do experiments
Don’t just do this blindly - figure out your key uncertainties, and focus your exploration on those
Exploration takes time and effort - seek advice on what things to do that could best give you value. Talk to people who’ve done similar things, and ask them what they learned from it
Mistakes
Prioritisation is far easier said than done, so here are some of the most common mistakes I see, and thoughts on how to overcome them:
Not making progress
It’s easy to think your prioritising, but really just go in circles. Spend ages agonising over the same information and same choices. Spend hours researching, but really getting no clarity.
This is pressing the Try Harder button - the goal of prioritisation is to get more information on what your final decision should be, not to go through the motions and invest effort in this. If investing effort gets you no further clarity, this is not achieving your goals
Of course, it’s hard to distinguish this from the problem just being difficult and taking time and effort!
My main solution to this is to ensure you remain grounded, to identify your key uncertainties, and to focus on these
It’s easy to fall down rabbit holes and not realise this. A good solution to this is to have regular check in times, where you zoom out, summarise what you’ve just done, and ask whether it’s bringing you closer to your goals.
Regularly write down the current state of your thoughts, and your best guess for the right action. If what you write down stops changing, then you’ve probably stopped making progress!
Under-estimating difficulty
Prioritisation is hard. It is genuine cognitive labour. It’s easy to get disheartened, and think you’re being an idiot or missing something obvious. And this is super unhelpful
I find it useful to remember that insecurities are in the map, and that “could I be doing better” is a question of the territory
But humans systematically under-estimate the value of information, and how difficult it was to think of an idea, so your intuitions are a poor guide for this.
Not considering alternate options hard enough
It’s super easy to get attached to specific options and approaches, and not to think widely enough. Or for anything outside a very small set of options to feel weird, and easily dismissed.
A common way this manifests is an attachment to your self-image.
Eg, identifying as a mathematician, who can only do pure maths, and must become an academic. And not considering paths beyond this, even if they might make you much happier
Eg, identifying as “bad at meeting new people”, and so not considering options that take you outside of your comfort zone, even though this is a skill which can be learned
Similarly, it’s easy to have cached thoughts. Like, deciding you were going to do a PhD when you were 18 and knew nothing about what academia would actually be like. And being attached to those cached thoughts, and not reconsidering them, even as evidence to the contrary has slowly accumulated over time.
Decouple prioritising and doing
Another trap is to be constantly paralysed in the moment. I have a deep desire for certainty and confidence. But this is essentially impossible to achieve.
If I constantly agonise in the moment about whether my actions are optimal, then I never get anything done. And this becomes the biggest thing holding me back.
The solution is to realise that prioritising and doing are different parts of my mind, that require different modes. It’s hard to do things while painfully aware of uncertainty, and agonising over whether this is your best option. And it’s easy to neglect switching costs, and to perpetually flit between things
In practice, I time-box the periods when I’m prioritising and thinking, and in the rest of my life
I find that goals are intricate enough that it’s useful to think in layers of abstraction (the following process works well for me, your mileage may vary):
In a weekly review, I can think about my high-level goals, and which projects will bring me closer to it. Between those, I want to just stick to the project ideas I came up with. (I’m considering switching this to monthly, or quarterly - exact time periods are hard)
This is hard, because if some genuinely new information comes up that should change my priorities, I want to respond to this! It’s difficult to balance and tell the difference from the inside. Nate Soares phrases this point far better than I can
At the start of each day, I plan my day. I know the projects I’m working on, so in the moment I’m thinking through how to implement those, and how to allocate my time, but not questioning whether those projects are my best projects. If no new information has come up, then my thoughts will be strictly worse than during those prioritisation periods
Sometimes I should add in a new project - this is a delicate balance, and takes practice, I’m far from perfect at it
And then in the moment, I just try to follow this plan
The underlying point is that it’s easy to fail to make progress when prioritising in the moment. You want to time-box it, do it well in those times, and just follow the plan in the rest of your life
Thinking you can do everything
A key skill of prioritisation is realising that you cannot do everything. Tasks, projects and opportunities accumulate far faster than you will ever be able to do them. But giving things up is painful, and it’s easy to think you can do everything. And if you’re going to do this task anyway, you may as well continue the fun & shiny task now!
A useful reframing: You cannot do everything, and must give something up. Implicitly, you will give up whatever task you don’t get round to. This is giving over all of the power of prioritisation to the default algorithm, and to random chance. There is no world where you don’t give something up, you’re just exerting choice over what that thing is
Short-term bias
It’s super easy to fall into a spiral of meaningless busywork, doing a range of things that ultimately won’t matter in the long-term. The tasks that feel urgent but aren’t important.
Humans have a significant short-term bias, so by default it will be true that you spend too much time on short-term stuff, and not enough time on your long-term goals
In practice, this manifests as a strong hesitation to give anything up. But, when you look back at what you’ve got done over the last month, there isn’t much that you feel truly satisfied about.
This is pretty hard to solve, and will depend a lot on your personal situation and how much autonomy you have. But if you can identify tasks that feel unimportant that consume your time, it’s worth spending some genuine effort thinking about ways you might reduce that.
One useful mindset is “what tasks will I be happy to have done, 5 years from now?”. Find those, and do those.
A good first step can be to time-box some time every week that can only be spent working towards long-term goals
Not prioritising how you prioritise
An easy trap is to over-optimise every part of your life. To obsess about any tiny shred of wasted motion, to get into an anxious state about every detail of your life.
The key lesson here is that humans are boundedly rational agents. Thinking and prioritising takes time and effort, and it is only worth it if that expenditure of time and effort can increase your efficiency enough over time to outweigh it.
This is why it’s important to consider the scale of the problem - focus on the big things, and don’t sweat the small stuff.
I conjecture that the kind of person who enjoys my blog is especially likely to fall into this trap.
Conclusion
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that prioritisation is incredibly important, and given some good starting points! This is a difficult and fuzzy skill, and there are a lot of things to balance. But I think it’s one of the most important life skills you can ever learn, and one that you improve at with practice.
Getting perfect at prioritisation is hard, but there’s some low-hanging fruit here. Things that are obviously worth prioritising, but which we rarely do enough. Some of the most obvious things that really matter (for most people):
Sleep
Exercise
Nutrition
Mental health - enough rest, relaxation, therapy, emotionally supportive environments, minimising stress
Physical health - good work environment, following medical advice, getting questionable things checked up
Family
Friendships
Careers
Rest and relaxation
Romance
Learning
Personal development, and meta-skills
Hobbies/how you spend your spare time
Are you happy with the state of your life for everything on that list? And if not, does that gap feel like a priority to you? And how, concretely, can you prioritise it better in future?
