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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1661 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 18, 2025

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Imagine you have a number of tasks to do. Some of them are relatively quick - maybe up to 15-20 minutes, some will probably take hours. You will eventually need to do all the tasks but you can do them in pretty much any order. Which ones do you start with? Is it the small ones to get a quick win and keep yourself motivated, or the largest one, so that once you do them you'd feel you made a lot of progress and what is left is easy work now compared to what you've already done? What would you do and why?

Quickest job first. Same as @CertainlyWorse. Just keeping track of everything that needs doing is worse than actually doing it. Provided that you properly subdivided your big tasks into small ones, there are no big tasks in the first place!

I'd like to do some of the small ones to cut down on the mental overhead of remembering my To Do list.

A most ill order them by location and dependency but mostly I try to not think about it at all because then I'll start procrastinating. The important part for me is to get going since that's the hard part for me. Once I'm actually working I don't need motivation to keep working.

Its like exercising, the hard part isn't finishing your workout when you're at the gym, it's going to the gym.

Obviously I'd look to optimize anywhere before sorting by size. Location, time procrastinated, value. After that I'd tend to do an opener small then move to big. There's a higher chance of something going wrong, and the remedy being combinable with a small task. Classic example is a repair that needs a part: hardware store is adjacent to grocery.

In a vacuum with zero bearing in reality, big first always. Suffering is easier to start with.

I’d start with a quick one, then alternate between quick and long. Ideally do a few quick ones in between each long one in order to help keep myself engaged. This method would give me a quick initial win, but also prevent me from bogging down at the end when I have multiple back-to-back long projects to do.

That’s in the perfect world, at least. In practice, I’d do a couple of quick ones, a couple of long ones, get distracted, then unexpectedly gain a burst of energy and tear through a number of longer projects at high speed, then procrastinate and possibly give up on the rest entirely.

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