Picture a common scenario for a student: you’re two weeks from an exam, you work part time doing things far more enjoyable than university, and you have a household to care for. Plus maintaining your social responsibilities; birthdays, saying hi to mum and brunch with friends. You’ve got a brand new day ahead of you. What do you do?
Most people belong to two categories who both make the wrong decisions: the perfectionists and the procrastinators.
Unless the perfectionists finish every task in correct order and to their full satisfaction they get a mental itch; the exam and some email have the same priority since both need to be completed. Even though the perfectionist would have aced the exam, he or she would still have felt like a failure since the email wasn’t written.
The procrastinators are better at prioritizing, since they know the exam is more important than the email. However, they seek “perfect conditions” before starting to work on the most important task. This is why so many people need to polish the bathroom mirror the week before the exam. They can’t study until every small, unimportant task is completed.
Most people would agree that keeping to a strict prioritization of tasks is crucial to getting things done, see also my post White space time management. You can’t afford to be a perfectionist regarding your schedule. But what is just as important is to avoid the trap of beginning with the seemingly important clutter on the todo list.
Perfect conditions don’t exist; there will always be yet another reason not to start working on what’s really important. But this argument goes deeper than to only justify the importance of prioritization: some minor tasks perhaps steal a disproportional amount of attention and thus need to be dealt with. Or perhaps a clear desk is simply a necessity to concentrate.
By keeping in mind that perfect conditions are an illusion, one can set out to find what finite preconditions are really necessary, and which ones are just an itch (if you’re a perfectionist) or which ones are just excuses to postpone what’s important.