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1 day ago
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I recently put together a new productivity system which helps me prioritize the tasks for my personal projects. It works similar to the Eisenhower method by identifying tasks that should be done immediately, put aside, or discarded entirely.
In the following, I will talk solely about tasks, although the system can be applied to all sorts of things that should be prioritized: a new project, feature requests, bug reports,…
The System
All three of the following labels - risk, effort and reward - have three levels: high, mid and low. All of your tasks may be assigned one level of each label, resulting in three labels in total. Depending on your task manager, be it a text file or something elaborate like TickTick, or even Jira, the labels might look like risk:low, effort-mid or reward/high. It’s entirely up to you and what your tool supports.
Risk
The risk could be anything that leads to some kind of loss or negative result, if the task fails: money, reputation, legal uncertainties, or simply time. Especially in business contexts, risks might pose a significant reason to not work on a task, while it’s more or less negligible in a private context.
In any case, it depends on the task itself. Risk is mostly associated with a loss of money in my case.
Effort
The effort is the sum of everything you need to put into a task to complete it. Like the risk, it depends entirely on the task. For a bug report, effort probably describes the time it takes to investigate the root cause and push a fix. When talking about entire projects, efforts start with the initial research, a business analysis, implementation, marketing,…
Reward
The reward can be basically anything you identify as the positive result of completing the task: a new source of income, likes and fame, or just the feeling of having done something good.
Other than risk and effort, the reward label is turned “upside down”: a high reward is good and a low reward is bad.
Prioritize tasks using the system
As soon as you’ve labeled your tasks with risk, effort and reward, they can be prioritized like reading a traffic sign.
- Tasks with risk:low, effort:low and reward:high should be done immediately. They are easily done, will lead to results quickly and are not associated with any risks.
- The in-between might look like this: risk:mid, effort:mid and reward:mid. Tasks like these might be put on hold until all “green” tasks are done.
- Finally, tasks you might delete right now: risk:high, effort:high and reward:low. Those tasks take long, pose a significant risk and will not yield any results.
That’s it. One quick note: this is just a simple system to prioritize tasks. If you find yourself in endless discussions about whether a task yields high rewards or imposes significant risks, you are too deep in the details.
You might implement a scoring system comparable to the RICE scoring model, but having my traffic light is enough for me to quickly identify the priority of tasks.
