Triaging Is a Life Skill

Play the long game with your Triage Shield

We’ve now spent the month exploring the Triage Shield concept completely. Here’s a summary of the ground we’ve covered:

1. Triage Shield - Your Triage Shield clearly separates the work you control from the inputs that you do not control. Fully constructed, it defends your sanity and allows you to spend more time in flow on the soul of your work.

2. External Brain - Your External Brain is a structured digital store that you can rely on to manage all of your work and all the details. Fully functional, this offloads a bunch of burden on your brain, freeing your brain to do what it does best: create.

3. Managing Email - Perhaps the single biggest input you’ll have to wrangle, email is the standard method of communication. Get on top of your email, and remove that dark cloud that’s been hovering over your head.

4. Herding Chats - Chats are used more pervasively now, but because of the lack of organization, most of the information exchanged in chats is lost. By intentionally handling each chat, you can ensure all asks that others have of you are captured.

5. Manage Project Tasks Responsibly - Having your own work management system track all the work you are responsible for is how you can more readily see everything on your plate, and reason about relative prioritization of all of your work. It also makes it easier to identify when you’re overcommitted and take early corrective actions with your team.

6. Make Meetings Worth the Time - Modeling the reliable capturing of all action items in a meeting is a great way to ensure that costly meetings are effective. More effective meetings leads to a more productive team.

7. Harness the Power of “Idea Bombs” - The single biggest lost input across your entire system are your own ideas. Creating an instantaneous system for capturing the continuous drip of ideas from your brain will unlock your creativity.

Each of these seven posts have focused on the isolated development of one triage muscle at a time. Now, following the Workout Mentality mindset, it’s time to talk about putting these muscles to use in concert, and integrating Triage Shield into the rest of your Grand Synthesis¹.

Play the long game²

This month we have talked about how to get on top of all of your inputs. Now it’s time to talk about how to stay on top of all of your inputs.

Before I had a Triage Shield, managing my inputs felt just like a crash diet. I would get behind, and after dropping the ball on missed communication or failing to follow through on a commitment, I would feel bad and vow to do better. I would take an entire workday (sometimes even two or three days) to clean through all of my email and chats. I would feel great after completing this purge, but without any routine in place, it wouldn’t take long for my email and chats to be out of control again.