I’m not the only one; lots of people have told you to prioritize your tasks, projects, and goals, because it’s a direct, effective way to increase your level of productivity and success.
But how many people have offered you any suggestions on exactly how to prioritize? No one has ever told me! Nevertheless, I’ve learned several different methods that can work very well. Here are a few of them you will probably find useful:
What Can You Finish?
There are times when the highest priority should be to finish one of your tasks, projects, or goals in the time you have available. At the end of the day, for example, you might want to clean up one or two items just to get them off your desk, allowing you afterwards to relax more completely with friends or family, and also to begin with a clean slate next time you start work.
Prioritizing an activity you can finish in the time available also offers a positive psychological boost – a feeling of accomplishment and control – that can carry over until your next working session begins.
What Will Please Others?
Another basis for prioritizing can be the demands and desires of other people who are important to you. If someone you want to please – perhaps a spouse, a child, a colleague, a client, or an employer – really wants you to work on a particular task, project, or goal, making it a higher priority will satisfy them and earn you good will for the next time you want their cooperation or support.
And let’s not overlook the possibility that this other person’s idea of what to prioritize may be smarter, more relevant, or just plain more fortuitous than yours.
What’s Most Important?
Probably the most conventional way to prioritize is to run through the list of demands and opportunities you face, and tackle the most important ones first. This is easy and works perfectly well when each task’s, project’s, and goal’s importance seems fairly clear.
When their relative importance gets murky, however, you need a more penetrating analysis to prioritize intelligently.
Here are some methods for prioritizing within more complex scenarios:
Itemized Comparisons
If you can’t pick out the most important task, project, or goal at a single glance, you might achieve more clarity with a series of itemized comparisons. This is simply a methodical process of comparing each task, project, or goal on your plate to all the others. For each comparison, decide which of the two ranks higher.
By systematically comparing the higher-ranking items to each other, you can often determine the one task, project, or goal you truly feel is “most important,” “most beneficial,” or whatever other criteria you’re considering.
If you can’t find a clear winner through systematic, itemized comparisons, you may need to more carefully define the criteria and values you’re using to judge these comparisons.
Matrix Rankings
In more complex situations – such as when you have many possible choices of what to work on and many criteria on which to evaluate them – you can build a simple matrix to help you keep track of all these judgments.
One of the simplest, of course, considers only urgency and importance. You can rank your tasks, projects, and goals on the basis of whether each one is urgent or not, and important or not. This allows you to divide them into the following groups:
- Urgent and important,
- Important but not urgent,
- Urgent but not important,
- Neither urgent nor important.
While we could argue about the relative priority of the middle two groups, it’s clear (at least to me) you should work on the top group first and the bottom group last.
An equivalent but different approach to priorities is to build a matrix that considers only the benefits that would flow from each of your tasks, projects, and goals, and the effort needed to complete it. This allows you to divide them into the following groups:
- Large benefits, little effort,
- Large benefits, large effort,
- Small benefits, small effort,
- Small benefits, large effort.
Again, the middle two groups’ priorities may be debatable, but I would argue you should work on the top group first and the bottom group last.
When you have more criteria than simply urgent and important or benefits and effort to consider, you can build a more complex matrix. For example, you can list all your tasks, projects, and goals in rows of a spreadsheet, and each criterion or value that’s important to you in separate columns. In each cell, you can then put a numerical score for each item on each value or criterion.
Add up the numbers in each row to determine how highly each item ranks on the criteria and values that are important to you. You may be surprised at how overwhelmingly a few of the tasks, projects, and goals outrank others that started out subjectively feeling equally useful and important to you.
You can make this matrix even more sophisticated and powerful by adding a “weight” to each of the criteria and values in the individual columns. In this variation, instead of simply adding up all the numbers along each row, you first multiply the number in each cell by the “weight” you’ve assigned that particular value or criterion. Now when you add the weighted scores along each row, you arrive at fairly sophisticated priority rankings for all the tasks, projects, and goals you’ve listed.
Depending on the details, prioritizing your tasks, projects, and goals can be simple or complex, quick or time-consuming. But whatever the case, determining the relevant priority of the demands and opportunities you face in both your work and your life is a primary mechanism for maximizing your level of productivity and success.
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