Priority Rules

• A living set of personal rules for prioritizing tasks. Improve incrementally.

Working principles

• Choose the highest-leverage tasks even when the week’s workload is low (e.g., sick, leave, traveling). A low-energy week shouldn’t slide into a low-leverage week — pick fewer items, but pick the most important ones.
• 3+ week carry-over rule — any item carried over 3 or more weeks gets a forcing function:
  • either elevate its priority and schedule it on a specific day, OR
  • formally move it to backlog / waiting (with the reason).
  • Goal: avoid the “always-on but never-done” zone.

Priority tiers

• P0 — Urgent
  • Must do immediately.
  • Usually customer-facing tasks that need a response or mitigation ASAP (e.g., production incident, enterprise customer escalation, data outage).
  • Drop other work to handle these.
• P1 — High
  • Should prioritize doing because some stakeholders are blocking.
  • Includes manager-elevated items and teammate-blocking reviews.
• P2 — Normal
  • Important but not urgent.
  • Picked up when no P1 tasks are active.
  • Most internal data work / improvements live here.
• P3 — Personal / Teaching / Free time
  • Personal projects, teaching, learning, exploration.
  • Can be done in free time, or delegated to others when possible.

Notes

• Re-read this page during weekly planning (Friday wrap-up).
• When a rule causes friction in practice, capture the friction here as a new bullet, then iterate.