The Butterfly Effect

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If you lead a busy life then you probably create a large to do list each week. Sometimes this can be overwhelming. The traditional way of dealing with the to do list is to rank the items in order of urgency:

• Low
• Medium
• High
• Urgent

Then you start with the urgent tasks, then high, then medium, until you reach the low priority tasks, by which time your may have reached the end of your working week and have no time left to finish then all. But, hey, they are non urgent, so it doesn’t really matter if they don’t all get done. or is it?

How do you judge whether a task is urgent or not? Generally you look at what would happen if a task is not done. If urgent tasks don’t get done then you think that there will be a big impact on your life, but if low tasks don’t get done then the impact will be less.

How confident are you that you can predict the outcome of things?

Consider the Butterfly Effect theory. This states that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world could somehow affect the weather patterns thousands of miles away. Although a theory, serious scientists say that simple, seemingly insignificant things can have much bigger effects than is apparent at first.  The straw that broke the camels back is based on the story of piling straw onto a camel. There is only so much weight that the camel can stand before its back is broken. There is a tipping point where just one extra straw makes all the difference. One straw weighs very little , but its impact when it is placed on the camel’s back is catastrophic resulting in a broken back.

Of course there is no actual flapping butterfly that has been observed to cause a hurricane, and no camel’s were hurt during this thought experiment. What these examples show is that small events can have great impact.

Here are more examples:

• You get on the middle carriage of a train and sit down next to a girl. You get talking and six months later you are married.
• You miss a plane by 10 minutes and curse the traffic that delayed you. The plane you were due to take crashes and kills all those on board.
• Faced with spending some time in the hospital waiting room, you pick up a woman’s magazine. You read an article about the plight of the poor in India which moves you so much that you fly to India to volunteer with the Mother Teressa organization.

Each of these actions in themselves seem to have no particular importance. You appear to randomly stand at the middle of the platform. You think that you casually pick up the magazine.

What this shows in the context of your to do list, is how difficult it is for you to predict the outcome of doing the low priority tasks. But, you may ask, the problem is getting all the tasks done. How can you be more productive? How do you get more things done in a week so that the low priority tasks don’t get left undone?

One way is to organise you tasks in a better, more efficient way. Take a look at Life Manager Pro, this may be just the thing that you need to get things done.