Tips, stories, and insights to better manage work, improve productivity and enhance collaboration. Knowing how to prioritize work affects the success of your project, the engagement of your team, and your role as a leader.
All projects—especially large, complex projects—need clear priorities. Easier said than done. Especially when every task appears to be priority number 1 and screaming for your attention. You can count on technical projects, no matter how well-planned, to involve change orders, re-prioritization and the regular appearance of surprises. Prioritization is the process of determining the level of importance and urgency of a task, thing or event. One of the biggest challenges for project managers and team leaders is accurately prioritizing the work that matters on a daily basis.
It takes a lot of practice and time management to get this right. Pull together everything you could possibly consider getting done in a day. This will help you frame up how and when to allocate your time wisely. Having trouble organizing your tasks in one central location? It helps teams come up with more realistic estimates for your tasks while answering the question, when? The next step is to see if you have any tasks that need immediate attention.
Allocate time to prioritizing your most urgent tasks earlier in the day. Prioritizing based on urgency also alleviates some of the stress when approaching a tight deadline or high pressure workload demands. Check to see if there are any high-priority dependencies that rely on you finishing up a piece of work now.
Be sure to contact any member of your team that can help finish any dependencies earlier in the day. Take a look at your important work and identify what carries the highest value to your business and organization.
As a general practice, you want to recognize exactly which types of tasks are critical and have top priority over the others. Another way to assess value is to look at how many people are impacted by your work. In general, the more people involved or impacted, the higher the stakes. At least not right away. But while the elements of prioritizing your work are simple i.
When priorities are piling up, you need a clear system in place to take you from overwhelmed to under control. Think of this as a brain dump. You want to get every possible thing that pulls at your attention out of your head and into a doc.
You have the tasks that need to be done today. The projects that need to be worked on this week or month. And the long-term goals that make you feel accomplished and empowered. As productivity consultant Brian Tracy explains , your monthly list pulls from your master list. Your weekly list pulls from your monthly list. And so on. This way, your daily priorities are always aligned with your bigger goals.
This prioritization method also helps combat the Completion Bias—our tendency to focus on finishing small tasks rather than working on larger, more complex ones.
Not just urgent ones. Your Master List helps you understand how to prioritize all your tasks. But it can still get complicated when deciding what needs to get done now versus later. There are a few prioritization techniques you can use to separate the urgent from the important tasks. The Pareto Principle relies on experience. In this case, you can use the Eisenhower Matrix. In basic terms, urgent tasks are things you feel like you need to react to right away, like emails, phone calls, texts, or news.
While important tasks are ones that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals. One of the most difficult tasks here is getting urgent but not important tasks off your priority list. This is where smart delegation comes into play. Delegating starts with finding the right person and explaining the task properly. But it also involves giving that person enough time and guidance to fully get the task off your plate and your mind.
In this case, follow the 30X rule —budget 30X as long as the task normally takes to complete for training. For example, if you have a task that takes 5 minutes to complete, you should budget minutes to delegate and train someone new on it. Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we end up with a massive list of urgent and important tasks we need to get done. In which case, we need to find a way to dig deeper and find their true importance. When you give each task a letter, though, only two qualify as A tasks, and most are D tasks that you can delegate or reschedule.
Now you know to focus only on those A tasks, and leave the D tasks until later or pass off to another teammate. For the chunking method , a chunk is defined as a focused work activity. It can be self-contained emptying your inbox , a slice of a larger project completing the first draft of a document , or a collection of small, unrelated tasks.
Your key here is to make these chunks focused, uninterrupted blocks of time. Turn off outside distractions and signal to others that you are unavailable by taking advantage of collaboration tools with features like do not disturb. Regardless, taking breaks in between chunks is also important to relax and refresh.
Chunking in action: You might start your day with one hour of design work followed by a coffee break. Then, two hours of scheduled meetings, lunch, and thirty minutes of email response time. Next, you move onto one hour of research on a new client. You note all of your activities in your calendar to hold yourself accountable and ensure no one schedules over your plan.
You end your day by taking a short social media break, head to the team update meeting, and then finish with a final hour of design work. Whether a task takes you minutes or weeks to complete, it always has a beginning and an end. So, once you have your list, add a start and an end date to each task. Doing this will make sure nothing falls through the cracks as new things come up and priorities need to shift. If a task is assigned to you without clear start or end dates, be sure to ask for that information so you can schedule a time to work on it and to set expectations.
Once you know these dates, you might even set your personal end date earlier than the actual deadline to account for unexpected issues or to turn in work early.
Think of your work as a puzzle: You need to know the pieces will fit together, and start and end dates are the edges of those puzzle pieces. To continue the metaphor, if tasks are puzzle pieces, with start and end dates noting their edges, then your calendar is the puzzle board where you assemble the bigger picture. Take advantage of this view to shift tasks and spread your work out more evenly.
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