How to weigh the small things and the important things?
The answer of the mathematician is very simple. You first estimate the "importance" of each task, and then calculate the "density" of each task.
The density of a task=importance/time to complete.
Then, you do things in descending order of task density. This will minimize your overall psychological burden.
A simple way to measure the importance of a task is to see how much income the task can bring to you. For example, you have two tasks: the first task you need to complete in 1 hour, it can bring you 200 yuan in income; the second task, you need to complete in 3 hours, it can bring you 300 yuan income. Then the mathematician said, you should do the first task first, because its density is 200, and the density of the second task is only 100.
The method is very simple, but the key to this idea lies in "quantification". You can’t just say “first things first”-just how important are important things? Now with this quantitative method, we know that if the completion time of task A is twice as long as that of task B, then the importance of A must be twice as high as that of B, so that we may give priority to doing A.
We call this algorithm the "weighted shortest processing time" algorithm.
