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💡 The Big Idea: Solving The Problem of Priority Dilution

Ever feel like you keep falling further behind the harder you work? ✋🏼

It’s caused by a phenomenon called priority dilution.

You get completely overwhelmed by how much you have to do, and as a result, you have trouble taking action on any of it.

In his book Procrastinate on Purpose, author Rory Vaden defines priority dilution as “delaying the day’s most important activities by allowing attention to shift to less important tasks.”

But when you allow your task manager to dictate what you do every day, it’s easy to end up here.

That’s why I firmly believe your task manager should NOT be a taskmaster.

The way to overcome this is to 1) consult your task manager for a list of suggestions, then 2) create a separate daily time-blocked plan. The task manager functions as The Brain and gives you a list of things to consider, and The List is a time-blocked plan of what you’re going to do when.

This is the approach I took when creating my Task Dashboard in Obsidian:

I look at my essential lists to get the lay of the land, but then I pick three things each day to time block around my meetings and appointments.

By forcing myself to only pick three things, I have a systemic way to fight back against priority dilution.

“But What About All the Other Tasks That Are Due Today?”

They don’t matter.

That sounds harsh, but the truth is you’re not going to get to all that stuff anyway.

You know the word “priority?” It’s actually singular. It means the very first or primary thing. And no one questioned it for about 500 years.

But around the time of the Industrial Revolution, people started talking about priorities (plural). Now, we’ve got five different priorities for wading through the messages in our email inbox.

Yes, you have more than one thing to do. But you can’t have more than one priority.

So, instead of making a bunch of promises to yourself and others that you won’t be able to keep, why not just choose right now what’s really important and focus on that?

Positive Procrastination

If you really want to simplify it, task management is really just dividing tasks between two buckets:

1. A single task you are doing right now
2. Everything else

At any given moment, we should really be paying attention to the thing we’re doing now — not all the things that are coming down the pike. The single (priority) task we are engaged with right now should have our full attention and effort.

This means that we are essentially procrastinating on every task we choose not to do right now.

Yes, this requires rock-solid systems to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks (that’s what my Task Dashboard is for). But if we really want to be productive, we must learn to procrastinate on purpose so we can focus completely on the task at hand.

😎 Something Cool: Harper Grammar Checker Plugin

I’m a big Grammarly fan, but it doesn’t work well with Obsidian. So, for several months, I’ve been using LanguageTool, which has an Obsidian plugin that bakes spelling and grammar checking right into the app. But lately, I’ve run into an issue where if I pause for a few seconds while writing, LanguageTool will lock on to some mistake I’ve made and then fail to save the text that I write after that. It’s extremely annoying, so I’ve been looking for something different (and more responsive).

This week, I came across an update to an offline grammar check called Harper. It’s a lightning-fast grammar checker that is completely offline, meaning you’re never waiting for it to phone home to a web service. It’s also private, so your writing isn’t used to train some LLM somewhere.

It’s not nearly as powerful as Grammarly, but it’s “good enough.” I’ll still run stuff I publish through Grammarly (like this Newsletter) before hitting Send, but if you want a grammar checker plugin that doesn’t slow you down while writing, check out Harper.

📚 Book Notes: Procrastinate on Purpose by Rory Vaden

I initially dismissed this book when I first came across it several years ago. But when we covered it for Bookworm a while back, I really enjoyed it. I actually think the Focus Funnel that Rory Vaden shares in Procrastinate on Purpose is a brilliantly simple way to keep your attention where it belongs. The big takeaway: Do the things you know you should be doing and delay everything else.

A simple but powerful message that only gets more relevant as the culture gets more and more busy.

If you want to download my book notes from this book, click here.

— Mike

P.S. In just a few weeks, we'll be doing our next LifeTheme cohort! As a Library member, all you need to do is click here if you want to join us. You'll get added to the appropriate spaces in The Library and we'll share more details as we get closer.