Priority

If you only listen to one final episode of Priority this week, make it this one! Eighteen months after taking to the digital airwaves, the Priority team finishes the podcast with an appropriate topic: how does one actually finish a big project? Max revisits strategies he has shared previously: committing specific blocks of time to work, focusing on only a few must-do projects, and taking advantage of random moods and inspirations to “finish things on a whim.” Caitie, meanwhile, considers her relationship to her work—finding the part of the project she can’t stop thinking about, paying attention to how long things actually take, and being kind to herself along the way. How will it all end? Will our hosts triumph over evil (or at least over self-derailing jokes and asides)? Join them one more time to find out!

We now join our episode synopsis, already in progress! Picking up where they left off last week, the Priority team discusses work in process. What do you do with your unfinished projects? The spectrum of management strategies runs the gamut from the Gantt chart to the stack of papers on your desk, and our hosts have explored all points in between. Caitie shares a cautionary tale about a treasure trove of half-formed ideas she once lost, and comes to the vaguely Buddhist conclusion that—important or not—unfinished work is fragile and impermanent. Max shares strategies he has seen work (including ones he candidly admits he doesn’t implement well). Ultimately, we learn to minimize work in process when we can, contain and secure it when we can’t, and to never, ever, include the word “Final” in a file name.

Can a preliminary sketch still be considered “art?” (Given how little editing Max does some weeks, our hosts hope so!) An exhibition of unfinished works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspires this episode’s topic: rough drafts. Caitie reminds us to appreciate our drafts, or even our rough-around-the-edges finished projects; a rough approximation is sometimes the best we can do and helps get us to something better. Max, meanwhile, points out that everything is a draft—even the most polished product represents where the creator stopped working, not some Platonic ideal of what it could be. From Kanye West to Harper Lee, and from Kevin Smith’s Clerks to refugee scientists’ unfinished studies, the Priority team contemplates and celebrates the imperfect and incomplete. These works which may be stepping stones to something better, but in any case are better than nothing.

How bad could it be? This week on Priority, our hosts explore the worst things that never happened! Caitie, in town to work an intense short-term contract, joins Max to discuss how depleted she feels. There’s just one hitch—she actually doesn’t feel half bad! Despite being good at managing her energy and boundaries, Caitie reflects on how often she overestimates how taxing a busy schedule or challenging conversation will be. Max wonders if the key is a loss of perspective, and recounts how he recently caught himself preparing for battles that only existed in his head. Humans turn out to be surprisingly bad at affective forecasting, or predicting how we will feel in the future. The Priority team doesn’t arrive at a solution, except to remind us to lighten up: it might not be as bad as we expect.

Where does the time go? The week, forty-five minutes of Priority’s time went into discussing Laura Vanderkam’s “The Busy Person’s Lies” and 168 Hours. She believes we have more time—and less work—than we think we do. Put your torches and pitchforks down, folks—as we will discover, Vanderkam knows of what she speaks, having studied the research literature and many individuals’ time logs. This inspires a lively discussion of various time-tracking schemes our hosts have attempted. Caitie reports a healthy balance of work and sleep. Max—a new dad—seems a little, well, less balanced. Caitie suggests that the secret may be to “get salaried, but think hourly.” In other words, get as much control as you can over your own time, but spend it as though it were still finite and measured—because ultimately, it is.

Toast. Tired. Beat. Exhausted. Under the weather. Over it. This week on Priority, Max asks an important question: how do you do your best work when you feel less than your best? What happens to your productivity when you are not firing on all cylinders? With an eight-week-old baby under his roof, it’s little wonder he’s struggling with these very issues right now. Caitie—no stranger to wearing multiple plates and keeping a lot of hats spinning—stresses the importance of good self-care. Getting enough (or at least more) rest, eating right, and even minimizing little annoyances all make a difference. Whether you’re burning the candle at both ends out of necessity, or just because you like fire, tune in this week for great tips on making the most of your work when you have the least to offer!

How would you rate your memory? If you said better than average, try this: can you recall that story Max told during our last episode—about the mommy blogger who made a reader so mad that they reported the blogger to Child Protective Services? If you find yourself nodding along, check your memory—that story got cut before you heard the episode! You are in good company, though. Max did the same thing when he recounted it without checking his sources (as it turns out, the incident never happened). The week on Priority, Caitie and Max explore memory, and its many failings. Our memories trick us, degrade, vanish, and sometimes spontaneously form from whole cloth. The only way out is a paradox: every strategy to improve our recall, from calendars to journals to photographs, involves not relying on memory itself.

Max is a new dad! Caitie is a new aunt! Priority has a new episode! One month ago, Max and Kourtney welcomed their son, Owen, into the world. Thanks to the experience of becoming a parent, Max now understands things about life and love that only another parent can appreciate. Kidding: this is not that kind of show. Max is actually pretty down on that kind of parental self-importance, but he does now understand a few things better than he did before. He’s rapidly becoming an expert on sleep deprivation, time constraints, and dirty diapers. This week on Priority, Caitie picks her co-host’s brain about life and work in a post-baby world, and tries to tackle some very real issues: what happens to work in the face of a newborn? How did he brace for change? And just how do you pronounce “aunt?”

Do you feel like you've been literally buried alive in business metaphors? Just missed your black belt in martial arts-inspired jargon? In the second half of their review of The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity, Max and Caitie explore the book's sage advice for managing schedules, technology, and energy. Caitie critiques the authors' varied imagery—the "gravel" of trivial tasks and notifications, or the Samurai-like "swordlessness" of one who avoids dependence on a particular tool. Max places The 5 Choices into its historical context, and suggests that the book even works as "GTD Light" for those who find David Allen's Getting Things Done overwhelming. The book’s sleazy antagonist, Carl, returns in these latter pages, too. The authors promise that their advice can handle him, but the Priority hosts don’t believe in leaving things to chance. Their takeaway? Carl must be stopped, at any cost.

This week, the Priority team presents the first half of its review of The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity. Caitie takes issue with the books’ hypothetical antagonist, Carl the office creep. Max feels slightly skeptical when authors Kory Kogon, Adam Merrill, and Leena Rinne claim this book isn’t about managing time. Worse, he picks a fight with the entire Internet over the productivity legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Still, our hosts can get behind The 5 Choices' actual focus: managing decisions, attention, and energy. And Caitie definitely appreciates the book's realistic standards: “extraordinary” goals, for instance, are a personal benchmark, not someone else's ideal. Will Carl finally be sent to the HR class on hostile work environments? Will Ike bomb Max back to the Stone Age? There are only five ways to find out...