Triage for the days when everything is urgent
A working method for the mornings when every request arrives marked urgent: three questions, one honest priority flag, and an order that survives the shift change.
Look at the boats in Hokusai's print. Three crews sit deep in the trough of a wave that has already decided what happens next, and every rower is still in rhythm, pointed the right way. Whatever the wave does, the boats have kept their order.
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. The only part of a morning like that you control is the order you work in.
Everything arrives marked urgent
Every request really is urgent to the person who sent it. From inside room 305, the broken AC in room 305 is the most important thing in the building. Triage exists because the queue needs an order, and the order can't come from whoever asks loudest.
Five requests in ten minutes. The one typed in capitals is a projector; the leak that can flood the kitchen came in lowercase.
Three questions, in order
Sort by what the delay will cost:
- What gets worse on its own? Water, heat, anything spreading. A leak doesn't wait its turn, so it goes first.
- What blocks the most people? One door that seats three hundred outranks one projector that seats twelve, even when the twelve are the board.
- What clears in two minutes? The bulb. Do it and close it; a shorter queue is easier for everyone to read.
Everything else gets an owner and a date, and stops costing attention until the 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 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: an owner, a date, and a flag on each ticket, where the next shift can see it.
Artwork: Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa, ca. 1831. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.
