When my phone rang at 6:30 a.m. and the first thing I heard was "Pam, you not doing job", I had no doubt who was on the other end of the line.  Yung had probably been cooling his heels for a couple of hours due to the time difference between LA and Chicago to get my attention.

Often, I was baffled since I knew that I was working hard on whatever project was on my plate.  When I heard this early morning greeting, I always had a suspicion that my priorities were not correct.  Yung was one of those rare managers who could almost instantaneously rearrange project priorities based on very subtle changes.

As I thought back over my career, I realized that many of us work very hard every day.  We come to work expecting to do our best.  However, we don't question our tasks or how much time we are spending on them.  When I was a newly minted manager, I had a very talented employee who was always spending 10 or 11 hours a day.  However, I was never quite sure what he was working on.  Often he would complete tasks with very low priorities while letting high priority tasks age into emergency status.

It is human nature to want to clear the easy things off of our plates first.  Remember that crossing things off your list releases endorphins which make you feel good.  (I know that you have all put completed tasks on your lists so that you could cross them off and get that endorphin rush!)  The more we need the endorphin reinforcement, the more likely we are to do the easy things and leave the hard things for later.

So while working hard, we are really not doing our jobs.  Project managers need to guard against this tendency since project managers not only have to prioritize their tasks, but also those of their team, and occasionally their stakeholders.

I don't think that there is any place in the Tao that directly deals with this talent for prioritization and doing what is most important first, but the following lines from Verse 12* perhaps come close.

"So the Sage is led by his inner truth
     and not his outer eye
He holds to what is deep
     and not what lies on the surface"

*Tao Te Ching, The Definitive Edition, Lao Tzu with Translation and Commentary by Jonathan Star, Jeremy P Tarcher/Penguin, 2001, page 25