Prioritization is a much discussed skill that can make the difference between wild success and just about managing your day-to-day tasks. In this article, we’re going to talk about what you can do to prioritize your time better and take charge of your to-do list.
Without prioritizing, managing your time properly, and achieving your goals is a challenge. Prioritization is the keystone of achieving your goals and moving forward in your life and your career.
What is Prioritization
Prioritization is basically defined as doing the most important thing first, which sounds simple. In principle, you simply arrange items or activities in order of importance relative to each other. But given that priorities change, unexpected tasks crop up, and that life can be anything but simple at times, prioritizing to achieve success isn’t always straightforward.
When prioritizing correctly, you know what activities should receive the most attention immediately and what can wait until later or another day. Without proper priority setting, you’ll waste time and energy on tasks that you could delegate to other people and tasks that really won’t make a difference. You’ll also spend far too much time wondering what you should do next, instead of laser focusing on the next thing on your list that will move you forward.
It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of doing busy work. You’re ticking things off your list. You feel like you’re doing something. But when you look at what you have achieved that day, you realize you’re no nearer to achieving your goals.
It is important to get this right, so you’re focusing on what needs to be done, today, this week, this month, and this year, to get to where you want to be.
How to prioritize tasks when you have so much to do
At this point, you’d perhaps expect us to tell you to make a list of things you need to get done. And we will. But first, we’re going to suggest something that we’ve found can help immensely with choosing the tasks to prioritize that will make the biggest difference to your life and career.
Instead of starting off with creating your to-do list, try daily brainstorming exercises to help you and your team prioritize more effectively. You can do this in a group, if you’re at work, or individually.
Keep your main goals in mind, and your long-term aspirations, then start brainstorming and freewriting to write down a list of tasks that will get you closer to your goals. Don’t worry about writing them in any particular order at the moment. Just write. Get everything in your head down on paper as much as you can.
You may find it helpful to try working backward from your goals, instead of trying to think of what the first step should be. This may help you break it down more easily and find the big steps, then the smaller tasks that make up your pathway to success.
Brainstorming helps you think of new ideas and tasks that can lead to success, without judgment, without limiting what you should think or how you should think. It’s just a list that you can edit later. You can be critical of the ideas on your list once you’re done.
When you’ve finished brainstorming, you can then look at the ideas and tasks you’ve written down and begin to rank them according to importance. You can weigh pros and cons, and one trick that might work for you is to organize them into four categories, along the lines of Stephen Covey’s suggestion in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
Write your categories at the top of your board:
- Urgent and Important
- Urgent and Not Important
- Not Urgent and Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
If you do this with sticky notes on a whiteboard, it’s easier to move items from one category to another as you begin to sort them and compare them with each other.
Anything that’s in the Not Urgent and Not Important list needs assessing to see whether it needs to be done at all, and if it does, do you need to be the one to do it or can you delegate it?
From here, you can create your to-do list for the day, the week, and the month.
Pick three items that must be done each day, either first thing in the morning or the night before, then you know you’re getting your most important tasks, the ones that really move the needle, done and out of the way. And if you have room at the end of the day, you can choose whether to work on something that’s less important but still needs doing, or to get a jump on the day after by picking another high-priority item.
Of course, you don’t work in isolation, and sometimes fresh, urgent tasks come in that need to be done now. If you allow some breathing room in your plan and build in time for potential changes, you won’t be stressed or thrown off your game. You’ll still be in control and ready to go.
You will also find that your priorities need to be changed to reflect new information, so stay flexible and adaptable and use your plan, rather than letting it use you.
The other thing to consider is that you are an individual, not a machine, and you have times of the day where you can focus better than others. If your schedule allows, do the more difficult items on your list at the time of day that you have the most focus and move easier items to when your focus is less. Work with your body and not against it.
With the right prioritization strategies, you really can make your task list and your plan work for you, and work your way through your list to success, one step at a time.
Impro Can Help
Impro has years of experience in helping people to reach their goals and achieve success. We can help you to think through your priorities and be creative about how you reach your goals.
With Impro on your team, you can get your priorities straight and achieve success that much faster.
Our online platform gives you the knowledge and focus of our highly experienced coaches in one place, and all it takes is five minutes a day to boost your performance and have you achieving your very best.
Find out more about Impro and our online platform on our website. And get in touch! We love to hear feedback from our people.