One piece of bad news can reorder your whole to-do list in a second. Don’t wait for it to find out what matters.

Bad news does one useful thing in the middle of being awful: it sorts your priorities instantly and with no effort from you. Items you had been agonising over drop off the list in a second, and one or two things you kept postponing become the only entries left. That sorting was always available. It usually takes a shock to run it.

You can run it on a calm day instead. Ask what would still matter tomorrow if something serious happened, then move one of those things into this week.