Triage for the days when everything is urgent

Look at Hokusai's boats. Three crews deep in the trough of a wave that has already decided what happens next, and every rower is still rowing, in rhythm, pointed the right way. The print is not about the wave. It is about the order in the boats.

Monday morning is the wave. The queue fills faster than anyone can empty it, every request arrives marked urgent, and the loudest requester is standing in the doorway. Rowing harder is not a plan. Rowing in order is.

Urgent is a claim, not a fact

Every request is urgent to the person who sent it. That is not cynicism, it is geometry: from inside room 305, the broken AC in room 305 is the most important thing in the building. Triage exists because a queue cannot be sorted by volume of feeling.

Five requests in ten minutes. The one in capitals has a boardroom behind it. The one that sinks the kitchen is written in lowercase.

Three questions, in order

Sort by what the delay costs, not by who is waiting hardest:

1. What gets worse on its own? Water, heat, anything spreading. A growing problem is a loan against your afternoon, and the interest compounds. It goes first.
2. What blocks the most people? One door that seats three hundred outranks one projector that seats twelve, even when the twelve are the board.
3. What clears in two minutes? The bulb. Do it, close it, and the queue's noise floor drops so the real work is visible.

Everything else gets an owner and a date, and stops costing attention until its date arrives.

Priorities only work when they are rare

A priority flag is a currency, and printing more of it buys less. If half the queue is high priority, the flag means "someone typed harder". Keep the default at none: a ticket without a flag is a ticket that trusts its date. In fam. the priority reads at one glance on the card, which is exactly why it has to be spent honestly. Reserve the flag and it keeps its meaning: drop the mop, this one is different.

The sort must survive the morning

Sorting the wave in your head works until the shift changes, and then the queue looks flat again to whoever inherits it. Put the order where the queue lives: the owner, the date, the flag, on each ticket. Sorted once, visible to whoever rows next.