I wake up in the morning, and short of brushing shaving and cleaning my self, I require Outlook to tell me what to do. My to do list (with its friends coffee and wireless) runs my life. And lately, it’s been out of control. As a consultant, academic, business person, and wannabe writer, my to do list is insane.

I sort by priority (only 3 values in Outlook, dammit), as well as start date and due date. And I have about 50 categories of to do items. This morning I realized that I’d really like another way of looking at my to-dos.

What I’d like is to be able to translate priority into Payoff (subjective, in terms of the things I want out of my life) and dates into Pressure (subjective, in terms of how obligated I feel to meet a due date). Then, I’d like to be able to look at the to-dos in a Pareto optimal sorta way.

A Pareto graph is like one of those “value versus horsepower” graphs you see for laptops in PC Mag reviews. By looking at where each laptop appears in this 2-D space, you can narrow your selections to those on the “Pareto front”: the layer of laptops furthest out from the graph’s origin.

Another example of a Pareto front (this one in the minimizing direction, so that close to the origin is “better”) is in the environmental impacts/costs space:

Pareto

If I could place my to-do items in the subjective, 2-D, Payoff and Pressure domain, I’d just pick off the Pareto front, and work on those items first.
And I could then better welcome my computer overlord every morning.