0:00:00 - 0:00:18 Almost never rerecord videos. Uh Usually if, if I can't do it well enough, I delete it and move on. But this one, I am rerecording and the first one was like 30 minutes, we'll see how fast this one can be and I'm pretty sure I can convey the same amount of information. Here's the bottom line up front 0:00:17 - 0:00:41 . Low urgency, low energy tasks should be queued for times when you have low energy, you could probably stop that now or just rewind it and keep listening to it until you get it. Let me blab a little bit about it. Maybe I can add clarity. What is a low urgency task? Um If you cut your hand off, stopping 0:00:41 - 0:00:00 the bleeding is a high urgency task. If you don't handle it right. This second, very high impact, bad things will happen. Cons bad consequences are temp temporarily. Um I guess the severity of the negative consequence is chronologically oriented. That's urgency. That that's a pretty good definition. 0:00:00 - 0:01:34 I think. Um what is a low urgency task? A low urgency task is my roof is leaking. My roof has a bowling balls size hole in it. Um That's conveniently located over a pile of money, which is my life savings and it's not going to rain for the next week. Now, why did I pick such a contrived example? I wanted 0:01:34 - 0:01:57 to show you that a high priority task is not necessarily high urgency. It's a very high priority to, to cover that hole that's over in your roof, over your life savings, but it's not high urgency. It can wait. And you might be thinking that's crazy. What could be more important than that? What if you 0:01:57 - 0:02:20 just chopped your hand off? You see. So, um in the long run, I guess we get into parsing hairs here. But let's say you have a lot of life savings, a lot of life saving, some crazy thing happened and you have way more than you need to live off of. Um, you need to protect that more than you need a hand 0:02:20 - 0:02:53 . But if you don't stop the bleeding, you're gonna die, right? Plus you've already lost your hand. You can't have it back anyway. In this case anyway, our lives are full of ways we can promote urgency artificially. And so email is one of these, you can check your email all day long if you'd like and 0:02:52 - 0:03:13 you'll feel the illusion of getting something important done, but then you'll wonder why you're all stressed out and you never get anything done. Uh I was working at the university for over eight years and I got emails from people working in my lab. I got emails from other members of the, the department 0:03:12 - 0:03:35 . I got emails from tons of students, got emails from the administration. There's, there were emails all the time. They were of varying importance, but many of them were very important. What I found was checking my email as a routine as something that I would do as a time filler. Like, ok, I'm at a stopping 0:03:35 - 0:03:57 point. I need to clear my brain, whatever. I'll check my email and maybe I check my email 20 times a day and I, I don't think that's unusual. Um At one point I had an alert on my phone every time I got a work email and that didn't last for very long at all. Um So over time I downgraded from on my phone 0:03:56 - 0:04:23 to checking it. I had it routed to my Gmail account, which is always up or was always up well, all day long to unplugging it from my gmail and only checking it on the university's uh email program which I would not keep open to. I think in the end I check it at the end of the day each day. Like when 0:04:22 - 0:04:42 I was ready to leave, I would check my email and this university job is not 9 to 5 in case you didn't know. Um So I would get in there as early as I could. And according to other priorities, which was usually pretty dang early, I I usually was the first one in the building and then I would leave when 0:04:42 - 0:05:06 I could no longer efficiently complete more tasks each day. And um, so I checked my email when I had nothing left to give. That was of importance in my own priority ranking because you don't, you can go to your email to send an email. And of course, I did that if I needed to send an email as part of 0:05:06 - 0:00:00 what I needed to do, I would go on there, but I wouldn't receive priorities from other people outside of my list, except at the very end of the day when I had nothing more to give to my productive enterprise. And I'd let people know this. It was in the syllabus. I told colleagues, most of them were, 0:00:00 - 0:00:00 didn't care fine, whatever, as long as the expectation was there, they wouldn't get upset when you didn't reply immediately. But um one or two did and whatever they, they just had to deal with it. So I told them why and uh I had the fruits to prove it because I got way more done than anyone else in, 0:00:00 - 0:06:07 in the same amount of time. Um And to quality standards, it wasn't garbage. I was producing. So applying this in your life is really important and it goes far beyond email just to give you another example from which hopefully you can extract the general application. Um Right now I, I have, I guess layers 0:06:07 - 0:06:29 of topical priorities in my life. And one of them is there's a whole set of things they need to do outside before the snow comes. Well, that's not the highest priority for me. Um At least it's not the most urgent thing. I just need to get it done before the snow comes. But what I do day to day in these 0:06:28 - 0:06:52 other realms is much more important. Like my, my uh full time job is much more important than that. So, um what I do is I queue up these tasks. I've noticed that um I can do outdoor tasks when I'm really tired and when my brain is fried. And so what I do is I, I save them up and then when I can no longer 0:06:51 - 0:07:16 productively contribute to more important things, I will go and do these things that are really important, but they aren't more important. They, they are low urgency, uh low energy tasks, but they are a high priority. So it's important to take a closer look at the qualities of the things that we need 0:07:16 - 0:07:33 to do and have more dimensions than one. When it comes to prioritization, it's not just, is this important or is it not important? You have to ask what's the impact and what's the cost? What resources do you need to complete this? There are many important things that you will only ever be able to get 0:07:33 - 0:08:02 reasonably um progressed by making them the first thing you do in a day, you have to be fresh. So um and, and just to clarify, you might say, how can uh you know, digging a hole be a low energy task? Um I'm not saying like I can't move my biceps because I'm low energy. I'm saying I'm really tired and 0:08:01 - 0:08:27 my brain is fried. So maybe that's an opportunity to um parse this down more, but it's, it's probably as simple as it needs to be. Hopefully you get it, it's really important to have AAA list of low urgency, low energy tasks. And also that when those things are high priority, still set them aside even 0:00:00 - 0:00:18 Almost never rerecord videos. Uh Usually if, if I can't do it well enough, I delete it and move on. But this one, I am rerecording and the first one was like 30 minutes, we'll see how fast this one can be and I'm pretty sure I can convey the same amount of information. Here's the bottom line up front 0:00:17 - 0:00:41 . Low urgency, low energy tasks should be queued for times when you have low energy, you could probably stop that now or just rewind it and keep listening to it until you get it. Let me blab a little bit about it. Maybe I can add clarity. What is a low urgency task? Um If you cut your hand off, stopping 0:00:41 - 0:00:00 the bleeding is a high urgency task. If you don't handle it right. This second, very high impact, bad things will happen. Cons bad consequences are temp temporarily. Um I guess the severity of the negative consequence is chronologically oriented. That's urgency. That that's a pretty good definition. 0:00:00 - 0:01:34 I think. Um what is a low urgency task? A low urgency task is my roof is leaking. My roof has a bowling balls size hole in it. Um That's conveniently located over a pile of money, which is my life savings and it's not going to rain for the next week. Now, why did I pick such a contrived example? I wanted 0:01:34 - 0:01:57 to show you that a high priority task is not necessarily high urgency. It's a very high priority to, to cover that hole that's over in your roof, over your life savings, but it's not high urgency. It can wait. And you might be thinking that's crazy. What could be more important than that? What if you 0:01:57 - 0:02:20 just chopped your hand off? You see. So, um in the long run, I guess we get into parsing hairs here. But let's say you have a lot of life savings, a lot of life saving, some crazy thing happened and you have way more than you need to live off of. Um, you need to protect that more than you need a hand 0:02:20 - 0:02:53 . But if you don't stop the bleeding, you're gonna die, right? Plus you've already lost your hand. You can't have it back anyway. In this case anyway, our lives are full of ways we can promote urgency artificially. And so email is one of these, you can check your email all day long if you'd like and 0:02:52 - 0:03:13 you'll feel the illusion of getting something important done, but then you'll wonder why you're all stressed out and you never get anything done. Uh I was working at the university for over eight years and I got emails from people working in my lab. I got emails from other members of the, the department 0:03:12 - 0:03:35 . I got emails from tons of students, got emails from the administration. There's, there were emails all the time. They were of varying importance, but many of them were very important. What I found was checking my email as a routine as something that I would do as a time filler. Like, ok, I'm at a stopping 0:03:35 - 0:03:57 point. I need to clear my brain, whatever. I'll check my email and maybe I check my email 20 times a day and I, I don't think that's unusual. Um At one point I had an alert on my phone every time I got a work email and that didn't last for very long at all. Um So over time I downgraded from on my phone 0:03:56 - 0:04:23 to checking it. I had it routed to my Gmail account, which is always up or was always up well, all day long to unplugging it from my gmail and only checking it on the university's uh email program which I would not keep open to. I think in the end I check it at the end of the day each day. Like when 0:04:22 - 0:04:42 I was ready to leave, I would check my email and this university job is not 9 to 5 in case you didn't know. Um So I would get in there as early as I could. And according to other priorities, which was usually pretty dang early, I I usually was the first one in the building and then I would leave when 0:04:42 - 0:05:06 I could no longer efficiently complete more tasks each day. And um, so I checked my email when I had nothing left to give. That was of importance in my own priority ranking because you don't, you can go to your email to send an email. And of course, I did that if I needed to send an email as part of 0:05:06 - 0:00:00 what I needed to do, I would go on there, but I wouldn't receive priorities from other people outside of my list, except at the very end of the day when I had nothing more to give to my productive enterprise. And I'd let people know this. It was in the syllabus. I told colleagues, most of them were, 0:00:00 - 0:00:00 didn't care fine, whatever, as long as the expectation was there, they wouldn't get upset when you didn't reply immediately. But um one or two did and whatever they, they just had to deal with it. So I told them why and uh I had the fruits to prove it because I got way more done than anyone else in, 0:00:00 - 0:06:07 in the same amount of time. Um And to quality standards, it wasn't garbage. I was producing. So applying this in your life is really important and it goes far beyond email just to give you another example from which hopefully you can extract the general application. Um Right now I, I have, I guess layers 0:06:07 - 0:06:29 of topical priorities in my life. And one of them is there's a whole set of things they need to do outside before the snow comes. Well, that's not the highest priority for me. Um At least it's not the most urgent thing. I just need to get it done before the snow comes. But what I do day to day in these 0:06:28 - 0:06:52 other realms is much more important. Like my, my uh full time job is much more important than that. So, um what I do is I queue up these tasks. I've noticed that um I can do outdoor tasks when I'm really tired and when my brain is fried. And so what I do is I, I save them up and then when I can no longer 0:06:51 - 0:07:16 productively contribute to more important things, I will go and do these things that are really important, but they aren't more important. They, they are low urgency, uh low energy tasks, but they are a high priority. So it's important to take a closer look at the qualities of the things that we need 0:07:16 - 0:07:33 to do and have more dimensions than one. When it comes to prioritization, it's not just, is this important or is it not important? You have to ask what's the impact and what's the cost? What resources do you need to complete this? There are many important things that you will only ever be able to get 0:07:33 - 0:08:02 reasonably um progressed by making them the first thing you do in a day, you have to be fresh. So um and, and just to clarify, you might say, how can uh you know, digging a hole be a low energy task? Um I'm not saying like I can't move my biceps because I'm low energy. I'm saying I'm really tired and 0:08:01 - 0:08:27 my brain is fried. So maybe that's an opportunity to um parse this down more, but it's, it's probably as simple as it needs to be. Hopefully you get it, it's really important to have AAA list of low urgency, low energy tasks. And also that when those things are high priority, still set them aside even 0:08:27 - 0:08:37 though they're high priority because daily you will have opportunities where you have low energy and then you can go get those things done.