Prioritization through matrixing

Today went well. I haven’t been good at setting intentions for the day. My activity is still based on what the pressures are right in front of me. But having a task manager has been helpful in keeping all the individual pieces from scattering across email and slips of paper. Asana also has robust features that allow me to search task that have not been assigned yet, and for tasks that have not been assigned to a project. Add to that the ability to search robustly and change views from project to agenda to calendar, and I have a tool that is flexible enough for my daily, idiosyncratic thinking.

Having this tool means that I have been better at getting tasks done across projects. It’s easy to follow through and remember the workflow for a single project, but when little things need to get done across many, I was losing pieces or I was getting too absorbed in one thing and not leaving enough time for others. Overall, this is still a work in progress (I’ve only been at it for a month or so), but it’s helping keep me from losing my mind.

What this doesn’t do is help me shape my work and prioritize. What I am slow to realize is that this conflict in priorities is the instersection between what is interesting to me, what I want my career trajectory to be, what may be advantageous to my career, and what is necessary to my job. The difficult part of prioritization is that I have a good idea about what is necessary to my job, a partial idea of what will be advantageous to my career, a good idea of what is interesting to me, and no idea what I want my career trajectory to look like.

But even this post has been enlightening because now, as I write this, I see that I can start to form a matrix to figure out the answers. The matrix will have holes in it (and it might always as some of these targets will always be moving), but I should be able to see how different topics align. Also, by showing me the holes, I can figure out if it is a true priority, but neglected, or if it is not. If I can’t answer that question directly, then I know it is a place where I need to ask more questions.

At this point, the projects and ideas exist in the task form. I can work on creating a matrix that combines my job description, goals from my performance review, and univerity library strategic plan (work expectations), the ideas and projects that I have going on (most of what’s interesting to me and may indicate my career trajectory). I would have to do some work on finding out which of these activities would be advantageous to my career. Some are obvious, like implementing projects and publication, but much of it might be influenced by the other things I need to learn in order to advance. For example, I might need to be more knowledgeable in scholarly communication and metadata in order to do more data librarian work.

I find in interesting that this matrix idea and the realization of the intersection of these different areas has come so quickly on the heels of being introduced to acceptance and committment therapy. I haven’t yet started personal work in this area, but what I do know is that it’s foundation is based on a discovering and understanding your value system and then recognizing thoughts, behaviors and actions and training myself to work with the value system. It sound suspiciously like the process I just described above.