Learn How to Prioritize

We all have the same 24 hours in a day. How do some people achieve so much more in the time that they have? Because they prioritize important tasks and plan the time needed to complete them.

You now have your projects and tasks defined in your master list. But of course you can’t do them all at once.

A pre-step to prioritizing is to start every day by asking yourself, “What do I want to accomplish today?” This will set your brain running on the right path.

To achieve more, you need to prioritize tasks so you know what to work on first.

By managing priorities, you can:

• Feel more in control
• Reduce your stress levels and feeling of overwhelm
• Maximize your output in a limited time
• Maintain an appropriate work/life balance. This is an important topic and we’ll come back to it in more detail in a later module.

For your business, the benefits also include:

• Increased productivity
• Making the best use of limited resources
• Meeting your customers’ needs.

Do you have a process to decide what to do when? Chances are you don’t, or you probably wouldn’t be feeling so overwhelmed.

Here’s a simple but very powerful way to prioritize. It’s known as the Urgent/Important Matrix or the Eisenhower Matrix. You’ll see there are four quadrants which reflect whether something is urgent and important, urgent and unimportant, important and not urgent, or neither urgent nor important. It also suggests quick ways to deal with tasks in each quadrant i.e. Do, Plan, Postpone, and Eliminate.

We’re looking at the importance and urgency for you and not for anyone else, so question the true urgency of a matter. For example, something that seems urgent to a customer may not be urgent to you and may just need a holding response.

Every task worth doing has an importance and urgency criteria.  Always ask yourself, “How important is this task?” and then, “How urgent is this task?”

There are three key steps to help you decide when to complete tasks and which task should be done first:

• Prioritize by deciding what is important and what is urgent on your master list.
• Consider the consequences of completing or not completing a particular task.
• Identify how long a task will take and the time you have available. We’ll come back to this in a later module.

Conflicting priorities can be a major source of stress, especially when you have to push important work aside to focus on less important, but urgent, tasks. Using the Urgent/Important matrix to reorganize your priorities will ensure that you’re devoting enough time to important, and not just urgent, work.

Define Your Key Priorities

Your business priorities are closely linked to your business goals. At least they should be. Make sure that everything is in alignment before moving forward.

Look back at your work on your big “Why?” then write down your business goals for the next 6 months.

Check that the projects you have listed in your business master list are in line with your business goals. If not, ask yourself why they’re on the list and whether they should stay or be deleted. Make those adjustments before going back to the list and assigning a category of priority to each project using the Urgent/Important matrix. Then do the same for each of the tasks.