How to determine the urgency of a task
If you just talked about it, then it must be urgent, but maybe not important
Everything you have ever worked on is urgent. This is why you work most days and why they are paying you.
urgent
adjective
(of a state or situation) requiring immediate action or attention.
(of action or an event) done or arranged in response to a pressing or critical situation.
(of a person or their manner) earnest and persistent in response to a pressing situation.
Most of your work is 1 or 2, and you need to be a person who is urgent in the third sense. You need to be perceived to be a #3.
Typically, the ticketing system will provide clues on how urgent something is, but normally, your company has a scale that protects the recording and accountability1 of a decision, so the priority system is something non-sensical like:
Super High Critical - you are expected not to eat or sleep until it is fixed. Updates must be provided every 15 minutes so that people who don’t understand what is happening know what is happening. Your parents are mad.
Critical - Someone is actively yelling at someone else about this, and updates must be provided frequently. You can eat and got to the bathroom on a typical schedule. You parents aren’t mad, they are disappointed.
High - This used to be critical, but was changed to High once a week passed, the yelling stopped, or new louder yelling started. This is the majority of work.
Medium - This will never be worked on, and contains 1% of all known tickets. This is where product managers put tickets that nobody seems to understand, but they are afraid to cancel or close. This is where cards from a previous administration go to retire.
Low - this shouldn’t have even been recorded and will be either not brought into the next ticketing system when it migrates, or closed to help KPIs as part of an audit 3 months before layoffs. In a poorly run technical organization, this is a synonym for the tech debt queue.
How to Make Sure You Work on Top Priority Cards
For all the same reasons, it is hard to figure out which product to build and to determine the urgency of tasks competing for time. But luckily, you are but a small cog in this enormous machine that produces software for cat moms, and you can just ask your boss what your top priority is.
Here’s the thing, though: you don’t have just one boss. Nobody does. Sure, sure, there is one person who tells you that you didn’t get a raise this year because of how pro-dog you were on social media and how you were late on a few key deadlines, but I mean the people you report to are never singular.
For example, your boss has a boss. Sometimes, their priorities override what your boss just told you to do. Sometimes, the boss of the boss of the boss shifts what everyone is working on. You also have other non-work bosses, like your family or your cat at home. It’s the age-old tale: you work your hands to the bone to make a cat blogging platform successful and forget to raise your cat. And you have an internal boss, with brains and ideas and stuff, and sometimes you feel that there are better things you could be working on.
How to Handle Constantly Changing Priorities
So here are a few techniques to handle this:
At work, ask your official boss what they think your priorities are. Do this every few weeks. Get them to edit a shared to-do list, product backlog, or some other sneaky in-writing format.
Keep track of everything that you were told to work on. If something was an emergency and now it is less of an emergency but you know it will be an emergency again soon - the smoldering items - keep track of this as well.
Rarely express your opinion on their view of priorities. Save any disagreement for when you really don’t agree. Be agreeable to change: We are done with that large boat you wanted - oh planes need to land on it too? Ok, we will retrofit it as an aircraft carrier, no problem! We embrace change!!. This is quite difficult to do without building a prejudice towards the other roles in your organization, but it is possible. Just think to yourself: man, there must be a lot of details I don’t know about for them to decide in some meeting at the last minute that planes should land on this freaking boat.
When you have a really good idea, pitch it to your boss after you have fleshed it out a bit. Since you have been so agreeable in the past, your voicing of a strong opinion now means more (maybe).
How to Communicate That You Are Aware of the Priority of Something
You might have been led to believe that keeping calm in a tense situation is a strength, but this can backfire. If the CEO, CTO, VP of Software Development, Product Manager, Staff Engineer over Scary Changes, Head of Risk, and Executive Chef are all on a production incident with you, and you act casual, you will be viewed as NotSerious, NotProfessional, and NotToBeTrusted, and they might add the Head of HR to the call. Instead, you need to use the fact that people’s nervous systems work in packs to communicate that you get it.
Start the call by FREAKING OUT. Then, calm down and solve the problem. Normally freaking out works in short bursts, because it shows that you are aware of the consequences, and gives a voice to what others are feeling. When you calm down, you show great levels of control and emotional intelligence. Even if you are faking it:
BAD EXAMPLE
(joins production call, Party Rockin is on in the background)
YOU: “Whattup”
INCIDENT MANAGER: “The system is completely down, and nobody can login”
YOU: “Again? OK…. I guess I can take a look”
GOOD EXAMPLE
(joins production call, Party Rockin is on in the background)
YOU: “What’s up”
INCIDENT MANAGER: “The system is completely down, and nobody can login”
YOU:
screaming “OH NO PLEASE NO”
(sound of music being turned off, glass breaking, and a cat maybe being kicked)
more screaming “THIS IS AWFUL, LET’S FIX IT, WITH GOD AS OUR WITNESS”
more calmly “Ok, let’s start by looking at the logs and gathering more information.”