As I’ve shared before, a useful way to generate leverage is to invest energy in activities that produce disproportionate return on investment. A reliable way to do that is to find causes and effects with exponential relationships.
One such cause and effect relationship is the effect of your level of organization when you are dealing with a high volume of activity and potential priorities.
The overhead of staying very organized isn’t worth it if you don’t have much to do. But, as your “to prioritize” queue gets longer, the overhead of organization pays itself forward many times over.
The lesson: Invest in developing a system for organization that works for us. The more we have on your plate, the more we’re going to be grateful for it.
PS: For those wanting to understand this further, the Operations theory behind this is fascinating. Waiting time in a queue = mean service time x utilization x variability. So, as your resource utilization/available time decreases, any variability in activity results in big delays in your ability to get to items later in the queue. When you are organized, however, you are able to get more done in less time => your utilization decreases => the queue wait time decreases exponentially.
