What does it mean that priority types enable triage?

Classifying items by importance or urgency enables systematic decision-making.

Example: Your task list has 47 items. Without priority types, you scan the whole list every time, picking whatever feels most urgent or generates the most anxiety. With four priority types — critical, high, normal, low — you stop scanning. You process the three critical items first, schedule the seven high items for the week, batch the normal items for when bandwidth opens, and let the low items sit until they either become relevant or expire. You went from 47 individual decisions to four categorical ones.

Try this: Take your current task list — whatever tool you use. Assign every item one of four priority types: P0 (must happen today or something breaks), P1 (must happen this week or progress stalls), P2 (improves something but can wait), P3 (nice to have, no deadline). Count how many items land in each bucket. If more than 20% are P0, your thresholds are too loose. If nothing is P3, you are not capturing enough and are filtering prematurely.