Pairwise Comparisons
For the purposes of prioritization, no two tasks can be equally important.
Pairwise comparisons are the basic building block of pairwise prioritization.
This is the central question:
Which task is more important?
What if the choice is really really hard?
Choices that look the same on paper can take vastly different shapes in our psyche. Let’s say you’re looking at two tasks and you can’t choose. Does it mean that pairwise comparison is inefficient?
Don’t shoot the messenger.
If the choice looks extremely hard, it’s just what it is, and that choice would have been equally difficult if it were buried in a backlog. Task Compass just presented it to you.
Sometimes the answer is easy. Most of the time it is. Sometimes, it’s not. You might need to resolve potentially complex and conflicting considerations, or even deep questions about your values. It might send you on a soul-seeking journey. It’s a feature, not a bug.
What if the two options are mutually exclusive?
This is a very interesting situation. There are two main possibilities where this might happen.
Fundamentally mutually-exclusive
One is when the two things fundamentally can’t coexist. Maybe you’re grappling with a question like “should I move to another city to take up this job?” that’s not prioritization, this is more of what Ruth Chang talked about in her brilliant TED talk about making hard choices.
Reference: TED Talk by Ruth Chang: How to make hard choices »
Time or resource constraints
Sometimes things are mutually exclusive because time constraints. Greg McKeown argues that “I can do both” is a often a fallacy.
Reference: a book by Greg McKeown, Essentiallism