I am twenty-six years old, and nobody taught me how to prioritize. School taught me algebra, which I have used exactly never, but not how to order a list of twenty-three urgent things, which I need every single week. The method that finally worked was not in any self-help book. A colleague in his sixties showed it to me, and he learned it in a computing class in the early 1980s. It is called the bubble sort, and it is the simplest sorting method ever taught. It translates directly into how to order a list of things you need to do.
Why a List of Everything Is a List of Nothing
Every productivity system I tried in my twenties gave the same advice: rank your tasks in order of importance. It sounds reasonable, and it is completely useless. Faced with twenty-three items, your brain cannot rank them. It can compare two of them. Ask yourself “which of these two matters more?” and you get an answer in seconds. Ask yourself to order twenty-three items by importance and you can’t even begin.
This is where the bubble sort comes in. It was invented to sort numbers in a computer, and it works because it never asks the computer to look at the whole list at once. It only ever compares two adjacent items, swaps them if they are in the wrong order, and moves on. Pass after pass, the big items float to the top. That is the whole method. And it is exactly how a human should sort a to-do list.
Stage 1: Write Everything Down
Make the list of everything you need to do - every task for the project, every project you are juggling, every errand. Write it in any order at all. Add everything you can think of, and do not edit as you go. You can always decide later that an item is not worth doing. The point of this stage is to get the whole load out of your head and onto the page, because a list you can see is a list you can sort, and a list in your head is just anxiety with extra steps.
Stage 2: Compare Only the First Two
Look at the first two items on the list. Ask two questions:
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Dependency: does one have to come before the other? If item B cannot be started until item A is finished, the decision is made for you. Leave them in that order and move on. Dependency settles arguments instantly and removes the need to agonize over importance at all.
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Importance: if neither depends on the other, which one actually matters more? If the first item is the more important one, leave them alone. If the second one matters more, swap them.
Then move to the next pair: items two and three. Compare them the same way. Swap if needed. Then items three and four. All the way down the list.
Stage 3: Do It Again Until Nothing Swaps
Here is the part that is surprising: one pass down the list is not enough. The first pass guarantees exactly one thing - the least important item sinks all the way to the bottom and stays there. Everything else has moved up at most one place. The item you care about most, if it started near the bottom, climbs only one spot per pass. So you go back to the start and compare the first two again, then the next pair, and so on. Each pass locks one more item into its final place at the bottom. When you complete a full pass without swapping anything, the list is sorted. Stop there.
In practice this takes far less time than it sounds, because most lists need only two or three passes before nothing moves, and each pass takes a couple of minutes.
The Rules That Make It Fast
The method works, but a few rules make it genuinely quick to use:
- Let dependency do the work. When one task must follow another, you never have to judge importance. The order is decided. Most of the painful decisions on a real list disappear this way. If several items depend on each other as a chain, treat them as one block that moves together - indent the group, sort the blocks against each other, and never split the chain.
- Do not sort everything. If your list has fifty items, you do not need all fifty in perfect order. Run the method until the top five or six items are clearly right, and stop. You will work through those before the rest of the list matters.
- Ties can go either way. If two items are genuinely equal, pick one and move on. The cost of a slightly wrong order between two equal tasks is zero. The cost of standing there deciding is not.
- The last item is allowed to be nothing. Every pass ends with the least important item at the bottom. Sometimes the right decision, once you see it at the bottom for the third pass, is to cross it off the list entirely. The method does not just order your work - it shows you which work you should not be doing at all.
The Method That Outlived Every App
The colleague who taught me this learned it in a computing class in the early 1980s. He has been using it on real lists ever since: work projects, home renovations, the week when everything broke at once. It has outlasted every planner, every app, and every productivity system that has come along since - and I have tried most of them. The reason is simple. It never asks you to judge the whole mountain. It only asks you to look at two rocks and say which is heavier. Anyone can do that, all the way down the list, until the mountain is in order.
This is the first in an occasional series about the things school never taught us. If there is a skill you had to learn the hard way, tell us - it may become the next guide.