How to Prioritize Your Work When Everything’s Important
One of the best ways to improve your productivity is to prioritize your work. But if you’re new to goal setting and time management, knowing how to do this can be tough.
Today I offer 4 steps to help you prioritize your work. Begin by brainstorming what needs to get done, then establish the urgency and importance of each task. Next, understand your limitations, set time limits for specific tasks, and establish clear deadlines for completing more involved work.
Read on for more ideas about how you can quickly prioritize your work and get the most out of your time.
Brainstorm
A great way to start prioritizing is to have a brainstorming session. You may have heard this called a mind dump or brain dump.
The idea is to make a list of everything that needs to be done. This includes tasks for clients, tasks for yourself, and others that need to be done to further your work. Exhaust every piece of work you think you need to do.
At first, this may seem like it takes a lot of time and work, but if you brainstorm regularly, it will go much quicker. I start my weekly reviews each Friday morning with a brainstorming session.
While it’s great to make a list either in your journal or even on a scrap sheet of paper, I’ve found that I’m even more effective if I use post-it notes.
I capture one idea or action item per note and stick them to the desk in front of me. After I’ve completed the brain dump, I arrange the post-it notes according to the steps outlined next. This process saves me time and makes me even more efficient.
The next step on this process is to evaluate your tasks on two dimensions – time sensitivity and importance. Here’s how:
Determine Time-Sensitivity
Some tasks need to be done urgently while other tasks aren’t as time-sensitive. Take the list you brainstormed and divide the tasks into two categories – urgent vs. not urgent. Urgent things are those that are related to deadlines.
Determine Importance
In addition to knowing what’s important timewise, it’s also important to look at the importance of each task. A task is important if it supports the overall vision of your business and supports bigger goals and priorities.
Some tasks are not as important but still need to get done. You may even find there are tasks that aren’t really that important at all and can be deleted from the list. Rank both the urgent and not urgent lists by importance.
To carry through my example with post-it notes, I arrange the notes in 4 quadrants on the desk in front of me. I use the urgent/important quadrants that Steven Covey shared in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This is sometimes referred to as the Eisenhower matrix.
Using sticky notes rather than collecting lists of tasks makes it easier for me to move tasks to the appropriate quadrant on my desk without having to rewrite them.
I place urgent and important things in the upper left quadrant, important and non-urgent things in the upper right quadrant, not important and urgent things in the bottom left quadrant, and non-urgent and non-important items in the lower right quadrant.
To learn more about the process Steven Covey taught, check out Habit 3, putting first things first, in his book the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
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Acknowledge Your Limits
We can overwhelm ourselves when we assign ourselves an unrealistic number of tasks to complete in a short period of time. Be realistic about what you can accomplish in a specific amount of time.
Overloading your to-do list can cause you to become paralyzed and get less done. You’ll get better at this over time.
Consider using a calendar app like google calendar or notion to capture the work you intend to do on a certain day. This way, if you can’t complete everything you planned, you can reprioritize the work for tomorrow or sometime later in the week – when you have appropriate time for the task.
Set Time Limits for Tasks
Are you a control freak like me? If you tend to spend too much time on a task because you seek perfection, give yourself time limits so that you won’t focus on one thing for too long while neglecting other tasks. This means establishing a time when you know it’s time to “let it go” for today.
I block time in my google calendar for completing important work each day. This helps me focus on the work at hand during the time I set aside for completion.
If you do many types of work each day, it may be helpful to set up a specific calendar in Google calendar for each type of work. For example, I have a workout calendar, sales call calendar, business planning calendar and an administrative task calendar. Each of these calendars is a different color and gives me an easy way to see how I intend to spend my day.
Set Deadlines
When you feel like you have all the time in the world to complete a project, you’re less likely to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.
You may be subject to Parkinson’s Law. The law states that work will expand to fill the time allotted for its completion.
Set deadlines to keep you motivated to finish in less time, and to get more done.
When you learn how to prioritize your work, you’ll more quickly know which tasks need to be done right away, which ones can wait, and which shouldn’t be completed – ever.
When you prioritize well, you’ll get more done and feel better about doing it.
Quick Summary – How To Prioritize Your Work:
- Brainstorm, then arrange tasks and projects by urgency and importance.
- Acknowledge your limitations.
- Set time limits for completing work to limit your perfectionist tenancies.
- Set deadlines.
