The pyramid prioritization system
IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIPS ARE BEING TRUMPED BY PEOPLE YOU BARELY KNOW
My life of relative comfort came to a screeching halt the day I shipped off to West Point.
After a tough first semester, I returned home to Texas at the holiday break, eager to experience a bit of “normal” life again. But perhaps because I had never perceived my time as scarce before, I had no internal tools to prioritize how to spend my too-brief winter respite. I said yes to almost every invitation that came my way, regardless of whom it came from or what it involved. I played sports I didn’t really like with people I barely knew, watched movies I can’t remember with distant acquaintances, and ate bland food at mediocre restaurants with people I would never see again.
When my vacation was over, I had a long, gray West Point winter to contemplate how little time I’d spent with the most important people in my life, precisely when I needed those vital relationships more than ever. I was only halfway through my freshman year. The last thing I could afford to do was to destabilize my most stabilizing relationships.
I started to imagine a pyramid, with my most important relationships at the top and other relationships below. It was a simple concept—a critical feature at that point in my life, when I was facing a slew of challenges—but the icon became a remarkably effective and consistent tool that I still use today to clarify who is most important to me and how I need to allocate my time.
I wasn’t the only person thinking about those ideas. Right around the same time, Stephen Covey published his perennial bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In the book, Covey wrote about a group of people clearing a path through a dense jungle to connect two villages.1 They threw themselves into the task and worked tirelessly to machete their way through the undergrowth. After a few days, a young boy climbed up the tallest tree to survey their progress. From his vantage point, he could see that they’d become misdirected and that the path they were clearing would not lead to the desired village. The boy yelled down from the tree, “Wrong jungle!”
It doesn’t matter how sharp your machete is or how tirelessly you swing it: if the path you’re clearing doesn’t connect to the right village, you’re wasting your precious time. When you devote your time and attention to your most important relationships, you are squarely in the right jungle.
The Internet exploded across our lives a few years after I graduated from West Point, and it wasn’t long before my pyramid prioritization scheme was under assault.
On the global scale, much of this pyramid smashing was easy to get behind. The free flow of information to closed societies, increased government transparency, and better access to data and information for billions of people are things that most of us, save a few dictators, support.
But the Internet didn’t discriminate between what should be dismantled and what shouldn’t. The digital revolution’s remarkable power to erase boundaries and allow instant access to anyone, anywhere, got personal, flattening pyramids and upending hierarchies and relationships for everyone.
The Internet and our digital devices are so powerful that they can easily upend our life’s priorities.
This last sentence sounds like a tall Texas tale, but we battle the gritty truth of it every day. Our digital devices, marketed as time-saving tools, have become the robber barons of our time and attention. It’s now too easy to send hundreds of marginally important messages, chat with distant acquaintances, and spend hours surfing the web, leaving no time to talk to the people who matter most to us.
No one is immune to the seductive siren song of the digital age. I make my living helping people and organizations establish and make progress toward meaningful goals. I teach classes on time management and peak performance. I write about the dangers of strategic drift in the digital age. But every morning, I still have to fight back the urge to start off my day on someone else’s foot by checking my e-mail. And some nights—when I can muster the courage—I review my web browsing history and see that I checked my e-mail more than I needed to and wasted a nontrivial amount of time cruising around the Internet.
A little Internet browsing and a few marginally important e-mails never ruined anyone’s life strategy. But we’re not really talking about a little and a few. The Internet inflicts strategic death with a thousand clicks, a thousand seconds of distraction that pile up day after day, supplanting the things we want to do with the things we have a hard time resisting.
The Internet and our powerful digital devices make it easier than ever to swing a high-tech machete in the wrong jungle. A functional prioritization system—even a simple one—that helps you build good relationships by ensuring that the important people in your life get nourishing quantities of your time and attention has never been more important.
Giving your time and your attention to the people who matter most is the investment of a lifetime.
The most comprehensive study of human development and aging, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, began over 75 years ago at Harvard University to explore how people develop over their lifetimes. The study included two cohorts of subjects: Grant study men who graduated from Harvard between 1933 and 1944 and Gleuck study men who grew up in inner-city Boston and were selected for observation from 1940 to 1945. The future president John F. Kennedy was an early participant in the Grant study, and for more than 30 years, George Vaillant was the director and caretaker of this research effort.2
Vaillant has published eight books and over a hundred articles based on the study’s data.3 When asked to distill what he had learned from a lifetime of studying the Grant study subjects, George Vaillant replied, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”4
The Harvard study will be over soon; many of the subjects are already deceased. In other words, almost all the data are in. And perhaps the most critical finding is this: good relationships = good life.
An essential countermeasure against the digital age’s ability to give anyone easy access to you begins with identifying the most important people in your life. Use the following pyramid prioritization system, or any system you like, but have a system for reserving enough time and attention for your critical relationships.
This pyramid system has four categories, A–D. When you consider where a person fits in your prioritization scheme, imagine that the person is calling you while you are in the middle of an important project or meeting that requires your attention, but one that you could pause if you had to. If you would always pick up the call from that person, label the person as part of group A. If you might take the call from that person, but you’ll always call back as soon as you can, the person goes in group B. If you would let the call go to voice mail, the person is part of group C or D. You’d connect with people in group C within a day, and you’d get back to people in group D whenever you can make the time.
The pyramid prioritization system
Your pyramid prioritization system will situate people into one of four tiers. The top two tiers will have mostly open access to you, and the bottom two tiers won’t.
Group A. Always take the call. These are the most important people in your life, emotionally and structurally. This very small group needs—and gets—open access to you. Your spouse or significant other, your children, and your parents probably go here. Your boss and a key client or two are also in this group because of the crucial structural roles they play in your life; their importance in your life and right to claim your time are indisputable. You might also put a best friend and close family members in group A.
Group B. Sometimes take the call. People in group B have good access to you but don’t quite make it to group A. You’re there for them when they need it, but you monitor this time a little more closely. It usually makes sense to include your mentors and the people who support you the most professionally (your fans) in this group.
Group C. Let the call go to voice mail, but reconnect within 24 hours. This category is filled with people you simply can’t quite relegate to group D—you feel like they’re important enough to be “named,” but you aren’t going to give them open access. Most colleagues and friends go here, as do many casual friends and extended family members. These people might bump up to group B temporarily if a situation like a specific project or an acute problem warrants it.
Group D. Let the call go to voice mail, and reconnect when you can. Everyone else goes here.
Once you’ve completed your pyramid, the question is, How does your pyramid match up to your life? The pyramid is what you want; your life is what’s actually happening. Are there people at the top of your pyramid who are not getting enough of your attention? People at the bottom who are eating up large amounts of time? Make changes to your allocation of time and energy to make your life more congruent with your pyramid.
Notice something else about your pyramid: the majority of the people at the top have been there for years—your spouse, a best friend or two, your closest family, your kids, and potentially even some of the people who mean the most to you at work. Most of your important relationships are already established, and they are damaged or dismantled at great personal cost. You can get a divorce, stop talking to a key coworker, escalate a feud with Aunt Betty, or designate a new best friend, but you will be throwing out years—and potentially decades—of your own history each time you do so.
Occasionally, changes like that will be an improvement. Removing yourself from a profoundly dysfunctional relationship with a boss, spouse, coworker, or friend is probably smart. But in an era when we can “unfriend” someone with the click of a button, it’s important to recognize that the ease of digitally unfriending masks a significant interpersonal cost.
To put the matter bluntly, most of us are out of time to find a new best friend, and we certainly can’t conjure up a new family from scratch. My number of available aunts and uncles is fixed and shrinking. The person I meet tomorrow who becomes my best friend can’t get in a time machine and travel back to my youth, to West Point and the army, to my time in academia, or even to my day yesterday. But many of the people already at the top of my pyramid have been through those things with me. These people are my people. They are part of my history and a large part of my life.
My pyramid is not static, though, and neither is yours. Relationships ebb and flow, work roles and bosses change, acute crises requiring time and attention emerge and abate. People move around in any prioritization system over time. Revisit and update your pyramid periodically, especially after significant changes in your life.
Don’t mischaracterize the people at the bottom of your scheme as “expendable.” Those who are relatively less important today might become more central in your life tomorrow; treating everyone throughout your prioritization system with kindness and decency is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do, because kindness doesn’t create a fraction of the problems that unkindness does. The main reason to prioritize isn’t to squeeze people out of your life; it’s to make sure that the most important people stay in it.
If you realize that you need to reduce the amount of time you spend with someone at the lower end of your pyramid, do so without fanfare. Most people won’t react well to being told that you’re going to spend less time with them, so don’t tell them. If online messages and interactions are eating up too much of your time, let the unessential ones die on the digital vine, and give yourself more leeway to ignore the e-mails, texts, and Facebook updates from people in the C and D groups.
Doing this may give you chunks of time back without raising any questions. But if someone does ask why you aren’t responding to his messages or why you aren’t spending as much time with him as you used to, offer an external and valid reason when you have one (“I’m getting crushed at work right now—I just don’t have any time,” or “Our new baby is taking all my time”).
Besides people, what else takes up your time? What keeps you from investing in the relationships that really matter? The best way to determine where your day goes is to keep a time log and, for many of us, to review our Internet history at the end of the day. It’s counterproductive to establish a relational prioritization pyramid, enforce it, and then use the extra time to engage in more of the digital age’s tantalizing temptations.
But be forgiving with yourself, because some days are less productive than others. Bounce back from a day filled with frequent e-mail interruptions with a morning away from your inbox. Follow 30 minutes of Internet cruising with an hour of meaningful work, and so on. Don’t take it personally that the Internet and your digital devices exert pressure on your priorities. They are really good at disrupting all kinds of things.
Many of the people in the A and B categories can’t be moved further down the pyramid. Unless there is a discrete break in the relationship (such as a divorce or a new job), it’s very hard to restrict anyone in the A group and many people in the B group as well. Therefore, it can be a major problem if someone in group A or B is constantly dominating your time and attention. I’m not talking about the time you give someone in a crisis or a one-time event, which is understandably and temporarily lopsided. One of the benefits of maintaining a functional prioritization system is that it enables you to facilitate a surge of time and attention when someone you care about is in a moment of need. But need is light-years away from needy.
See what happens if you give a needy person less of your time and attention, because it’s possible that you’re enabling some of the behavior. Take the long view and reduce your time and attention to the needy person slowly over a period of weeks and months until you reach a sustainable level.
When we stop and think about it, we know there’s more to life than answering e-mails and clicking around on the Internet. A prioritization system will safeguard our time and energy for the important people and activities in our life. From there, we’ll need to protect against filling that valuable space with counterproductive communication and incessant chatter. That’s the subject of our next chapter.