You need to stop reading this blog post and do some sorting. I don’t mean later today, when you have spare time, I mean right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
OK, did you do it? If you did leave me a comment about what you sorted (prioritized, categorized, arranged, screened, rated, grouped, graded…). If you didn’t leave me a comment about why you didn’t.
Enough with the homework.
It took me a long time to figure out that sorting is the most important thing to be done.
If it didn’t take you as long as me to figure it out gratz! You are winning the game of life.
But if you need more hints here are my reasons (in order of importance) why sorting is the first thing you do at in the morning and the last thing you do at night.
- If you don’t sort the odds are that you won’t do the most important thing first. You’ll most likely do the most urgent thing first. There are wickedly huge differences between urgent and important. Ask Keen PDA if you don’t know the difference.
- You have to do a lot of sorting to get good at it. Putting your priorities in order is actually hard work (I think that’s why most people don’t do it). You need to become an elite performer in sorting and that takes practice–lots and lots of it.
- Not everything you want or should do is going to get done in your life time. You have to make choices. I know, making choices sucks. But that’s the way it is for us mortals.
I have this great book, The Order of Things (There is one other, more important book, by the same title and you should read it first). I bought TOOT back in 1999 from the discount bin of a bookstore in Palo Alto. I was working at a startup, BitLocker, and we thought we might want to create an online database with most of the world of things already represented. The big problem with databases, after you have the right schema, is data entry. Its boring, easy to screw up, and not fun to double-check. So I wanted to pre-populate the BitLocker with all the bits that a consumer might want to track–All the CDs ever released, all the comic books ever published, all the automobiles ever manufactured. Then when you wanted to track your collection of comix it was just a matter of search and selection (something that is actually fun and easy).
I thought TOOT might help me design the UI of BitLocker and prioritize the search results so that the bits would appear in a natural order that the majority of users would find sensible to navigate. But I was doing things for BitLocker in the wrong order. What we needed first was a good business model. Instead we build a cool Java-based online object database with an early version of an AJAX UI.
Naturally BitLocker’s bubble burst along with the rest of the dot coms. So stop reading this and go sort your to-do list!