Nothing drives me nuts more than when somebody says, “Oh man, I have so many fires to put out. I got all these fires, everything’s urgent…”
[….]
To which I will say “So you’re being strategic about how you’re approaching everything right now?” and they’re like, “Well, yeah, but there’s so many fires.”
Do you know that firefighters legitimately will let things burn?
[….]
They go, you know what? Sometimes it’s better to let this burn so you can save this thing, as opposed to trying to attack the thing that’s burning and ignoring what could be next in line. Or the correlation and causation of what’s going on with the fire.
Mike Vardy, PM Talks S1E8: Urgency
I’ve used a lot of time in therapy lately to talk about issues with prioritization and trying to pare down my inflated list of Things I Wanna Do. Sara has an analogy about thinking of it as juggling, but some balls are glass and some balls are plastic.
Keep the glass ones moving, and let the plastic ones fall if you need to. You can pick them up later if necessary.
But this chunk of the PM Talks podcast series quoted above got at something else for me: Letting things go.
It’s not easy to look at something and either hit delete, or ship what’s there without those last perfectionism-influenced steps. It’s not easy because it feels like giving up.
But the savings in bandwidth, and the increased focus on the things that matter more? That would be a benefit. It’s not giving up, it’s giving space.
It also ties in to something from Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity:
There exists a myth that it’s hard to say no, whether to someone else or to your own ambition. The reality is that saying no isn’t so bad if you have hard evidence that it’s the only reasonable answer.
This frames it a little differently, but also creates something that might be an easier ask than the question of “What’s most important out of all this?”
“What must I say no to?”
This Builds Character 