As we all know, rice prioritization can be difficult. Sometimes it feels like everything needs to get done immediately and there is no way to prioritize work in order of importance or urgency. Just making a list of what you need to do doesn’t really help because so many things are demanding your attention at once it’s hard to focus on just one thing for very long. However, by using a fairly simple strategy called rice prioritization, you can make sure the tasks that need the most attention get completed first while allowing room for other projects throughout the day.
In the rice framework, you group your work into three categories: rice, beans and rice & beans.
The rice items are given the highest priority as these are the tasks that will make the biggest impact on your business. Beans can take a backseat for now as they don’t have as much of an immediate impact but should still be worked on from time to time within reason. Rice & beans is a category reserved for important items that either need further clarification or aren’t clear enough to put in either rice or beans just yet so they get lumped together temporarily before you move onto the rice portion of the list.
In this article we’ll look at how rice scoring works and give you some tips to help ensure successful rice scoring for your business.
Rice score is essentially a way to breakdown your rice backlog into manageable items that are easy to prioritize. You should score rice in order of highest impact to lowest so if you have 5 rice tasks to work on it will be much easier for you to focus on rice tasks with the biggest impact first rather than spreading out efforts across all rice tasks equally.
You can use any system you’d like when scoring rice but this article will explain an approach that has worked well for me in the past. The premise behind this method is using a 1-5 scale, anything at 6 or above goes in rice & beans until it’s further clarified, anything below 6 gets put into Rice priority ready to be scored. You can use any scale you want, perhaps a 1-10 scale would be better but the basic idea is rice tasks should be reliably impactful while rice & beans should be smaller and less predictable.
How to Prioritize Your Work Efficiently
Now we get to the actual scoring process. I recommend starting with rice prioritization (RP) first since that’s what most people are familiar with, however, rice score will probably end up taking more time than RP since it’s fairly new.
1) Review your rice priorities list, eliminate anything that’s at level rice & beans (anything at 5 or lower still isn’t clear enough to do).
2) Look for any misaligned tasks or efforts, make sure everyone knows they can propose new rice without getting permission from anyone else.
3) Look for superfluous tasks or efforts, make sure everyone knows they can cancel rice without getting permission from anyone else.
4) Review rice scores . If anything is at rice & beans (anything at 6 or lower), then either (a) it should be split into 2 rice (pro-tip: if you had to break work down into multiple rice during rice prioritization , put the full effort of that work in one rice instead of splitting it; its easier on your brain to work on something thats doable), (b) ask people who are working on them why they believe their rice will be reliably impactful, and revise the score if necessary, or (c) cancel them.
5) Cancel rice . If anything is at rice & beans (anything at 6 or lower), it should be canceled.
6) Review rice scores and make final cuts . All rise above rice and beans should now have a score, and we can go through them one-by-one. If you’re doing quick reviews (which is fine!), the process for this is: — Go down your list of rice from highest scoring to lowest scoring, and look up all their work. For each rice , ask yourself “what would happen if I just stopped doing the rice right now?” As soon as the answer is something other than “it would keep going” then that’s grounds for canceling that rice immediately . If there is no rice remaining then you’ve successfully just stopped doing rice and rice .
7) Cancel the rice and mark the remaining rice ready for next month’s rice . We’re almost done! Just mark the rice at 6 or lower as canceled.
Rice is only allowed to be cancelled if they have a score of six points or less, to ensure that we are still getting their service. Otherwise, it would make little sense to allow them to continue when there are many others who can provide at least equally good services in exchange for much less rice doers . Rice must also be reviewed before being canceled. There has been too much abuse in canceling rice without going through this process, which has resulted in repeated instances where rice who thought they were cancelled found that they were given rice doers as a replacement.
