Quarterly priority debt audit

When This Fires

• Quarterly, during priority review sessions
• When important-but-not-urgent items keep appearing on review lists without ever getting scheduled
• When the cost of addressing a deferred priority has grown noticeably since you first identified it
• Complements Block Q2 tasks on the calendar with specific day+hour… (Q2 calendar blocking) with the debt-assessment that determines which Q2 items to schedule

Common Failure Mode

FIFO deferral: addressing the oldest deferred item first because "it's been waiting longest." Age ≠ urgency. A priority deferred for a year at low interest may still be cheap to address. A priority deferred for one quarter at high interest may have already tripled in cost. Schedule by interest rate (cost growth speed), not by age.

The Protocol

(1) Quarterly, list all important-but-not-urgent priorities that have been identified but not addressed. (2) For each: Date first identified: when did you first recognize this as important? Original cost: what would it have cost to address when first identified? (Time, effort, resources.) Current cost: what would it cost to address now? Interest rate: current cost ÷ original cost = cost multiplier. Higher multiplier = faster-growing debt. (3) Rank by interest rate (cost growth speed), not by age or original importance. (4) Schedule the top 2-3 highest-interest-rate items for the coming quarter (Block Q2 tasks on the calendar with specific day+hour…). These are the debts compounding fastest and therefore the most expensive to continue deferring. (5) Accept that some low-interest debts may remain deferred indefinitely — if the cost barely grows, the urgency is genuinely low.