Prioritisation

In the 1950s the psychologist George A Miller published research into peoples’ memory-span capacity - that is, how many ‘things’ can your working memory recognise at any one time?

Miller’s research showed the answer to be seven, plus or minus two; meaning that most of us will only succesfully be able to remember somewhere between 5 and nine things at the same time. Subsequent research puts the answer even lower - somewhere around four!

I like to use this information about how our minds work when I’m setting my priorities for the year ahead.

What I do each year is to set 3-5 key priorities for the year, the top one becoming my theme for the year. I’ve evolved this method over the last decade until it actually functions pretty well for me. It’s so much better to have a small working number of broad priorities, plus a defining theme, than to have a whole bunch of New Year’s Resolutions that you’ll never keep.

I started this year by planning to have 5 priorities, including my overall theme. I wrote them down initially in early-December and kicked them around for a while to see if they looked right. But when I went to tell my wife what they were after a week or so, I couldn’t remember one of them! What I’ve done now is to reduce that down to three priorities for 2009, including my overall theme. Here they are, then I’ll say a little about how I use them:

Nick’s Priorities for 2009:

1. Healthy Body, Healthy Mind (=theme for the year)
2. Complete my NLP Master Practitioner
3. Publish my first book

I know some of those might not mean much to you, and I’ll probably write about them in later messages; the important thing is that they mean something to me. I actually have ‘SMART’ goals for each of them as well, but for now I just want to get over to you the idea of having a small number of priorities which you can easily carry around IN YOUR HEAD.

Here’s how I use them. Whenever I come to a decision point during my day, for example:

• “What should I do first?”
• “Do I go to that networking event this evening or not?”
• “I’ve got more/less money than I’d planned, what do I spend/cut-back on?”

…I then use my priorities and theme for the year to help decide.

I run them like a kind of ‘cascade’ - can the first thing I do be something towards my overall theme? If not, can it be towards my second priority? If I have to choose between one thing and another, which choice will most benefit my theme or one of my other priorities? When I’m managing my resources, how do I best marshal them towards my theme and other priorities?

Also, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have a number of baseline and unconscious priorities to factor in as well - things like not getting fired (unless you want to), taking care of your family. I find it helps to let those priorities take care of themselves, as the drive is usually strong enough to assert itself!

So how about you?

If you had around four priorities for 2009, and maybe an overall theme, what might they be?