When volume exceeds capacity, sort fast, act on the critical few, and stop perfect sorting. Medical-style triage: urgency plus ability to help, not fairness of reading order.
When to Use
Inboxes, incidents, review queues, or alerts are backing up.
You risk analysis paralysis—spending more time labeling than fixing.
Workflow
Time-box sorting (e.g., 15–25 minutes): never spend thirty minutes debating a five-minute task in triage.
Four buckets: Act now (real deadline or stop-the-line harm), Schedule (important, not immediate), Delegate (owner exists), Drop (low value or not yours).
Urgency vs leverage: prioritize what unblocks others or reduces blast radius.
Batch similar items (approvals, typos, quick replies) to reduce context switching.
Information flood: skim → flag candidates → deep-dive only top slices; avoid linear reading of everything.
“Enough” rule: triage ends when every item has a bucket and a next step or owner—not when every item is finished.
Review loop: reschedule a short revisit for the Schedule bucket; archive or delete obvious Drop items.
Examples
Example 1: Morning email surge: 10-minute pass for Act now + quick Delegates; block calendar for top two Scheduled deep items.
Example 2: Alert storm during outage: triage by customer impact and dependency order; defer cosmetic warnings until stable.
1---2name: triage3description: Triage4---5# Triage67When volume exceeds capacity, sort fast, act on the critical few, and stop perfect sorting. Medical-style triage: urgency plus ability to help, not fairness of reading order.89## When to Use10- Inboxes, incidents, review queues, or alerts are backing up.11- You risk analysis paralysis—spending more time labeling than fixing.1213## Workflow141. **Time-box sorting** (e.g., 15–25 minutes): never spend thirty minutes debating a five-minute task in triage.152. **Four buckets**: **Act now** (real deadline or stop-the-line harm), **Schedule** (important, not immediate), **Delegate** (owner exists), **Drop** (low value or not yours).163. **Urgency vs leverage**: prioritize what unblocks others or reduces blast radius.174. **Batch** similar items (approvals, typos, quick replies) to reduce context switching.185. **Information flood**: skim → flag candidates → deep-dive only top slices; avoid linear reading of everything.196. **“Enough” rule**: triage ends when every item has a bucket and a next step or owner—not when every item is finished.207. **Review loop**: reschedule a short revisit for the Schedule bucket; archive or delete obvious Drop items.2122## Examples23**Example 1:** Morning email surge: 10-minute pass for Act now + quick Delegates; block calendar for top two Scheduled deep items.2425**Example 2:** Alert storm during outage: triage by customer impact and dependency order; defer cosmetic warnings until stable.
Run npx skillmds@latest add sethdford/triage in your terminal (requires Node.js), paste this page's agent-chat prompt into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-connected agent, or download the SKILL.md file and copy it into your agent's skills directory.
Triage It is listed under Coding & Dev Tools on SkillMD.
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sethdford (@sethdford) published this skill. Their other Agent Skills are listed on their SkillMD profile.
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