Stephen Robbins here.

Welcome to the Get It Done Guy's quick and dirty tips to work less and do more.

A member of the Get It Done Guy Facebook community was despondent.

She wrote in,

I work in professional communications.

Everything is top priority the moment it comes in.

How can I prioritize my day?

Reporters have also written in with the same question, as have customer service people.

In fact, all jobs where people are juggling a dozen projects and where some evil nemesis

is throwing new balls into the mix every couple of moments.

In some spiritual practices, they say the world is just a product of your thinking.

I disagree. You may think you can fly, but if you jump off the top of a 10-story building,

you will be disappointed to find out that gravity exists regardless of your thoughts.

On the bright side, however, you'll only be disappointed for a few seconds.

In the real world, if you take a job where priorities change from minute to minute, there is no

way you can manage your time except minute to minute. Your job is emergency driven, and that

won't change. You can always get a new job. Fast food workers are in huge demand, but if you

choose to stay with your current one, you need to learn to live with emergencies. Who lives with

emergencies every day? Hospital

emergency rooms, of course. I've never been to one, but I watch nurse Jackie, so I feel like

I have a really good, accurate idea of what goes on there. Emergency rooms use triage. When a patient

comes in, someone does a quick evaluation and decides who gets in now,

...