

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Algorithms to Live By" by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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How should you optimally spend your working hours every day? What tasks should you complete first?
Your optimal scheduling depends on your goals and priorities. In their book Algorithms to Live By, Christian and Griffiths make a case of using computer algorithms to schedule your day in the most optimal way.
Here is how to schedule your time using Christian and Griffiths’s scheduling algorithms.
Scheduling Algorithms
If you want to know how to schedule your time effectively, you don’t need to predict what’s going to happen—you just need to know how to evaluate new options as they present themselves. Christian and Griffiths’s simple algorithms are intended to make this evaluation as easy as possible.
Algorithm #1: To be efficient, complete the shortest tasks first, weighted by importance.
Christian and Griffiths assert that most of the time, your highest priority is to complete whatever tasks earn you the most value.
Typically, the tasks we need to accomplish come with rewards for completing them and/or consequences for remaining incomplete. The authors explain that if all your tasks are equally important, you can maximize your value by completing whatever available tasks that will take you the shortest amount of time. In computer science, this algorithm is called “Shortest Processing Time,” or “SPT.”
However, Christian and Griffiths point out that in real life, the items on our to-do list are never completely equal. Clearly, you wouldn’t go grocery shopping instead of attending your wedding just because it would take less time. Therefore, Christian and Griffiths advise you to assign a “weight,” a measurement of value, to every item on your to-do list. By dividing this weight by the amount of time it’ll take you to complete the task, you can easily calculate how much value you’re generating every hour that you’re working.
By continuously working on whatever task gives you the most value per hour (a “Weighted SPT” algorithm), you can squeeze the most value out of your workday as possible.
Money is the simplest way to measure the “weight” of a given task—calculating your hourly rate for every task on your to-do list will give an easy way to schedule for maximum value—but assigning your own “importance values” to each task works just as well.
Brian Tracy on How to Schedule Your Time In the productivity bestseller Eat That Frog! Brian Tracy places even more importance on the need to weigh your tasks by value than the authors do. He argues that your most valuable tasks are almost always the most difficult to complete—as a result, most people procrastinate on these major tasks, filling their time with easy busywork that ends up accomplishing very little. Tracy’s thesis is that unless you intentionally tackle difficult high-value tasks first, life will hand you a never-ending supply of easy low-value tasks, and you’ll never get around to doing what’s truly important. Instead of following Christian and Griffiths’s suggestion to calculate value per hour, potentially getting bogged down in unnecessary math, Tracy recommends that you sort each of your tasks into tiers of importance. Assign each task on your to-do list a letter: A, B, C, D, or E. Complete “A,” “B,” and “C,” tasks in descending order of importance. “D” stands for “delegate”—find a way for someone else to do this task for you. “E” stands for “eliminate”—habitual tasks that do nothing but waste your time should be ruthlessly cut out of your schedule. Tracy’s advice diverges from Christian and Griffiths’s Weighted SPT algorithm in that he doesn’t find much use in tackling the shortest tasks first. In his view, by breaking your most important tasks down into a series of shorter steps, you can translate everything you have to do into tasks that take approximately the same amount of time. Then, all you need to do is rank them by importance. |

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- How to schedule your to-do list like a computer
- Why making random decisions is sometimes the smartest thing to do
- Why you should reject the first 37% of positions in your job search