Red, Yellow, Green: A Triage Log for a Life That Fell Apart

A sticky note is stuck to my monitor, three colors of pen on it, and it looks like a child’s traffic light. The note is the only tool from this whole log that I would keep if I had to throw the rest away.

A quick disclosure before the log: the narrator here is a constructed composite, not a real person. The four weeks below are a realistic sketch of how this kind of reset tends to go, written in first person because a log reads better that way. The method is real; the diary is illustrative.

The short answer to “how do I fix my life when everything is a mess” is that you stop treating it as one problem. You sort the problems by urgency, fix the worst first, and deliberately leave some alone. Emergency medicine has a name for that sorting, and it is the best ordering rule I have found.

Where the idea comes from

Triage is French for sorting, and in an emergency it means deciding who gets attention first when there are more patients than hands. One widely used method is START, short for Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment, which Hoag Hospital staff and the Newport Beach Fire Department in California developed in 1983. It checks three things in each patient: breathing, circulation, and mental status. The result is a colored tag: red for immediate, yellow for delayed, green for minor, and black for those who are deceased or not expected to survive given the resources available.

Two features matter for a messy life. First, the method is built so a responder with modest training can run it quickly on a crowd, with no deliberation about each person. Second, the categories are about what happens if you wait, not about how frightening the injury looks. A person shouting with a broken arm is green. A quiet person whose breathing is failing is red.

That second feature is what a messy life needs. The loudest problem is rarely the most dangerous one. A hard edge around today is the older version of the same idea; William Osler’s day-tight compartments came from ship design.

Week 4: the sticky note

This week I mostly maintain. The list has shrunk from thirty-one items to nine. Four are yellow, four are green, and one is black. Nothing is red, and I did not expect that to feel so quiet.

Sunday re-sort took eleven minutes. I moved the dentist appointment from yellow to red because the tooth started to hurt, and I booked it before I finished my coffee. That is the point of re-tagging: the list is a picture of Sunday, not a verdict.

Week 3: the yellow pile opens up

Red was cleared by Wednesday. Now I let myself touch yellow, one item at a time, in the order of who is waiting on me. A tax form went first because a deadline is a person in disguise. A conversation with a sibling went second, and it took twenty minutes and a lot less than the dread had promised.

The black item is a garage full of my late uncle’s boxes. It is a real problem. It is also not one I can do anything useful about while the rest of my life is rebuilding, and triage explicitly permits that. Leaving it black is not avoidance when you have named it and dated the next look. I wrote “look again in March” next to it.

Week 2: the green fix that changed the arithmetic

By now red was shrinking, but I was doing red work on four hours of broken sleep and it showed. I made mistakes on the bank call and forgot to attach a document twice.

So I added one green item on purpose: get up at a fixed time, every day, weekends too. Green does not mean unimportant. It means cheap to fix and safe to fix first, and this one improved the conditions for everything else. A person who is up at the same hour tends to go to bed at a similar hour, which is the sort of quiet knock-on effect a long list of red items cannot deliver. If you want the shift-work version of the problem, the way 911 dispatchers get up for overnight shifts shows how much of this is trial and error even for people whose job is emergencies.

Willpower was not going to hold a fixed wake time against a bad week, so I gave it a witness. DontSnooze is an alarm that gives you 30 seconds to record a video showing you are up, and if you miss it, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you picked. I chose two friends who knew what I was doing. The first Tuesday I nearly lost the race to the cover of my blanket and the video came out looking like a hostage recording. That was fine. Both friends replied with a thumbs up, and the streak counter started at one.

The rest of the day was still hard. But the bank call went better.

I also cut the second coffee. Caffeine’s half-life is roughly five to six hours for most adults, which meant the 3 p.m. cup I had been using to survive the day was still working on me at bedtime.

Week 1: the sort, and the rule against fixing

The first entry is mostly a list. I set a timer for forty minutes, sat down with a pad, and wrote every problem I could think of without solving anything. I got to thirty-one. Rent was on it. So was a cracked phone screen, an unanswered letter from a lawyer, a friend I owed a call, a gym membership I hated, a car registration, a rash I had ignored, a vague fear about my career, and “become a person who cooks.”

Then I sorted with a simple test taken from the medical version: what happens if this waits seven days?

• Red: gets worse or causes lasting damage. Rent, the lawyer’s letter, the rash, the car registration. Four items.
• Yellow: serious, but a week will not change it. The call with my friend, the career fear, the gym membership. Eleven items.
• Green: small and cheap to fix. Phone screen, an errand, a form. Twelve items.
• Black: real, but not solvable with what I have this month. Four items, including the boxes.

The rule that made the week work was the least natural one: I was not allowed to work on yellow or green until every red item had a next action scheduled. That felt wrong. The cracked screen was right there and easy and would have felt good to fix. Triage says it is the wrong first move, because feeling good and being safe are different things, and the rash was not going to book itself.

I ended the week with three red items closed, one waiting on a callback, and a mild headache. Nothing dramatic. The dramatic part had happened earlier, in the months I spent looking at the whole heap at once.

Before the sort, it can help to calm the alarm in your own head, and a ten-minute script for talking to yourself by name is one way to do it.

What this method does not do

It does not tell you what a good life is, and it does not diagnose. The categories are a judgment call, and they rely on your honesty about what is truly urgent. Anxiety tends to tag everything red, and avoidance tends to tag everything black. A second pair of eyes helps: hand the list to someone steady and ask them to argue with your colors.

It also is not treatment. If the red pile includes your safety or a health emergency, the right step is a professional or a crisis line, ahead of any list. Sorting is what you do once the ground is stable enough to stand on.

Finally, START itself is designed for a crowd with limited time and resources, which is a different situation from a slow-motion life. Real life lets you re-tag every Sunday. That is a gift the emergency scene does not offer, so use it.