Prioritizing unplanned work is hard, especially when we’re overwhelmed.

In this context, I’ve found it helpful to split things into two groups: important or not. My team calls this “binary prioritization”. We work on the important stuff and forget everything else; anything misidentified as unimportant will bubble back up.

Brandon Chu’s essay “Ruthless Prioritization” provides a helpful distinction: work within a project vs work between projects. The former benefits from binary prioritization; the latter from a more rigorous process, like OKRs.

This also reminds me of Amazon’s “Bias for action” principle, and the Agile principles. For example, Agile embraces change (“Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage”). Binary prioritization enables us to embrace a high volume of change.