Many of my posting ideas come from thoughts that cross my mind at random times during the day. Here’s one that struck me while walking to a gate at an airport.

I was thinking about how I haven’t written a blog post in a while and I was trying to get at some root causes as to why not. There’s no shortage of ideas. I actually have a notebook full of blog post ideas and probably a dozen or more half-written blog posts scattered about. So why wasn’t I taking the time to finish them and post them? And the answer is, prioritization. During the last few weeks, I have not made authoring a blog post a priority. And if you look back over a lot of my previous posts, you’ll note this underlying base principle surfaces in many places.

This of course led to a spiraling of thought, and the more I thought about it the more I realized it’s not just in business or in engineering, but everywhere in life.

Think about it. You prioritize:

Which items in a backlog to work on first.
Which customers or market segments to focus on.
Which people to promote into limited new roles.
Which items on your grocery list to buy with a limited budget.
Which chores or tasks to do when you are time constrained, both at work and at home.

When looked at through this lens you can realize that the art of prioritization is itself a skill that can be practiced and honed. There are many simple tricks you can use (i.e. “if it only takes a few minutes then just prioritize it now”), and there are other more complex approaches (pros/cons lists, effort vs impact, quad charts, and so forth).

Note that I’m not talking about discipline, which is the art and skill of forcing yourself to actually work on the task you’ve decided to do. I’m talking about being able to look at the list of options or tasks and deciding which is the one that is most important, or should be worked on next.

There’s no shortage of books and blogs and podcasts on various techniques on how to prioritize things. But make sure you take that into account next time you’re making a prioritization decision and don’t just pick something at random. Even if its just ten seconds, spend a moment thinking about what your prioritization criteria are, and make sure you’re making a mindful decision.