Setting priorities.

Apologies for the missing post yesterday, I just flat out forgot to get things ready for the post yesterday! Either way, here we are today. We've got a lot that's going to be coming up so I'm going to talk about how I handle prioritization. This is going to be especially important given that a lot of decisions are going to have to be made in a short period of time coming up without enough resources to get everything done. That sort of environment leads to decision fatigue, thus, prioritization.

Let's start off my thinking about criteria for prioritization. We've got plenty to do! To start with, I have a fairly standard system for setting priorities. Tier 1: Tasks that affect the survival, health, or well being of the family. Tier 2: Tasks that affect the survival, health, or well being of living creatures. Tier 3: Tasks that will escalate to one of the upper tier tasks if left unaddressed. Tier 4: Tasks that are going to improve our quality of life. Tier 5: Things that would be nice to do when we have the time or resources. There are some modifiers to all of these tiers of course. One of them is how much it costs in terms of resources, both in terms of time, and other resources. Sometimes we just don't have the money to do something that is a higher tier, and that is where things can become problematic. So let's look at some examples and how I'd prioritize them.

The rabbit hutches need cleaning, and painting. This is two tasks when looking at it for priorities. It breaks down to the hutches need cleaning. The hutches need painting. They break down to being Tier 2 for the rabbit hutches need cleaning, and Tier 5 for painting the hutches. That said painting the hutches has a decent chance of being done sooner than other things because of  the simple fact that it doesn't take long, and we already have the resources. Alright, so let's look at something else

Clean up the yard. This one would normally be Tier 4, but because we didn't do proper fall cleaning because we were focused on the kitchen project, it's Tier 3. If we leave crap around the yard it is going to affect the well being of our family because the Critter could injure himself, things rotting out isn't good. Ok, so let's look at what we have so far.

Clean Rabbit Hutches
Clean the yard
Paint the rabbit hutches

Let's keep going down the list. Breed the rabbits. This is a Tier 4 task at face value, but because it affects the food supply directly, this is Tier 1. Why isn't this done yet? Well, this is where discretion comes in and why this isn't just a plug in the numbers and go system. We need the rabbit hutches properly cleaned out for spring first. That puts us with the order thus.

Clean rabbit hutches
Breed rabbits
Clean the yard
Paint the rabbit hutches

Instead of going through all of the rest of the list I'm just going to make a list of our current order of priorities. If you have questions about why I make the decisions I do about priorities, ask away!

Clean rabbit hutches
Breed rabbits
Start seeds inside
Start cold hearty seeds outside
Clean the yard
Deal with the dangerous timber
Move chickens to the larger coop
Move the hawthorn tree
Tear out the raspberry bushes
Clear the brush line
Dig new garden beds
Paint the rabbit hutches
Build a mud room bench
Build or dig beds on the south slope

You'll probably notice that some of the tasks seem to be out of the normal priority order. For example, start seeds inside, and start cold hearty seeds outside are above clean the yard. Here's the thing, some things are very time limited. Gardening is very time limited and restricted, so the urgency of anything that has to do with that gets tied to time limited situations. If you plant too late, you don't get crops. If you don't weed, you don't get good production. In a lot of ways that ends up pushing things up similar to the "There are live animals involved." Similarly building or digging beds on the south slope is fairly far down the list not so much because it is going to take a lot of resources in terms of time.

Of course one of the big tenets of prioritization and time management is to be flexible. If an opportunity comes up that's "out of order," or an emergency comes up things can change places on the list. In those cases you just have to know what's important, and make sure you don't over extend resources to the point your high priority tasks don't get done in time.

The next step is to set deadlines.