Deliberate Priority Inflation
A Quick&Dirty Hack To Get Out of Mental Quicksand
This essay is part of my Scale-Smart Moves series on tactics & operations that compound across your system. See the full index here.
There is a small productivity hack I occasionally use when I find myself endlessly postponing the same task. Often, when I push something to a future date, I do so intentionally because it no longer fits my current schedule. But sometimes I actually have the chance to complete it and still decide not to. If this happens once, I just ignore it. If it happens twice, I get curious. If it happens thrice, I treat it as a red flag.
Work avoidance has many faces and just as many solutions. The best remedy I know of and the one I propose in my book is to rescope—early and often. By modifying, rephrasing, and clarifying a task artifact, you can usually get a foot in the door. And that can be enough to get you going. However, if you tried that and it doesn’t work or the real problem wasn’t procrastination in the first place, but something else (like flawed priorities), then here’s a small hack you can use, which I call deliberate priority inflation:
Every time you postpone a task, increase the priority of the task artifact by 1.
In practice, in my Todoist, this could mean bumping it up from p2 (orange) to p1 (red) before rescheduling it to another day. With this, I allow myself to rescope my work without hard feelings, knowing that the next time it shows up, it will have a higher priority tag. I will defer it for now, but knowing it will come back stronger.
Note that this hack only operates on the artifact you have mapped out into a list or app, but it works even if, in your mind, the priority remains the same. Because, after all, you can’t will yourself into caring more about something.
So far, so good. But what if you have already reached the highest priority level?
Well, you have never reached the highest priority level. You can always further escalate somehow. In Todoist, p1 (red) is the highest priority you can set. But once I reach that, I can further put emphasis on any given artifact by appending exclamation marks (!, !!, !!!) to the description or by adding other visual aids (hello emojis).
All priorities are essentially effort scopes. And there is no harm in creating new scopes ad hoc whenever needed. In fact, that is the whole idea of scoping. We just want to break out of our mental quicksand habits and routines, and we want the artifact to jump out at us the next time we see it.
NOTE: Of all the moves I presented in this series, this is the most low-level solution, meaning it can backfire or not work at all for you, even though it works perfectly for me. I included it to show that a scale system can accommodate hacks and quick-and-dirty tactics to some extent. Using hacks and tactics is not a failure. It’s just that these should make up only a tiny portion of the overall system.
