Prioritize!

2011-01-26, 09:12

In your workday, do you daily have such large amounts of work needing to be done that you several times a day need to determine what to prioritize, what the right thing to do next is amongst all the things you could choose to do?

Perhaps it's also true for you that you get interrupted with what you are doing over and over again throughout the day? An e-mail drops into your inbox (and you can't help yourself from peeking to see what it is), the phone rings or a colleague pops into your office to ask you to “check something”.

Well, I'm guessing this sounds familiar, just as it does for so many of those reading Done!.

Fact is, that “prioritizing” is one of the things most of those I meet in my work as a Struktör ask for help with.

Do it yourself

From time to time, most people probably feel that it would be nice if someone could just tell them what should have the highest priority in their work.

But, as I see it, only you can make a priority which is just right for you, since only you have the full picture, the overview of your entire situation and your area of responsibility. Only you can make the necessary considerations which are the foundations for the right priority.

It can be hard to prioritize right off the bat, so you need something to lean on. Luckily, there are a couple of methods which usually do the trick in most situations.

Urgent or important, one of them or both?

The perhaps most recognized and famous method is the ”Urgent-Important”-matrix, which, according to some sources, was originally created by Steven R. Covey.

Imagine a square matrix, meaning, a square divided by a grid into four equally sized parts, like a window with bars. The left, vertical axis is labeled ”Important” (meaning, how important it is for the well-being of the company in the long-run) and the bottom, horizontal axis, is labeled “urgent” (that is, the degree of urgency). The two top squares are important and the bottom two aren't. The two squares to the left are urgent and those to the right are not.

All the tasks you have ahead of you today and all new tasks landing on your desk can be placed in one of the four boxes.

So, these could be:

Urgent and Important: Prioritize these tasks the highest. They need to be done soon and are also vital to the health and well-being of the business in the long-run.
Urgent, but not important: Do these tasks as soon as you can and have time. Most probably, someone is waiting for you to finish them, so make sure to get them done as soon as possible even if they're not important in a longer perspective. It might still be nice not to have that one colleague constantly hanging over your head.
Not urgent, but important: Schedule time in your agenda for doing and completing these tasks. They tend to get neglected by mistake, since they aren't urgent. But, they may be important in the long-run, so you are right to make sure to get them done. Otherwise they may turn into urgent as well, and then it might be too late.
Neither urgent nor important: Think about if you really should spend time on these tasks at all. If they're neither urgent nor important, why should they be done? Because someone says so? OK, then there might be something you're not aware of, which makes the person who wants them to be done to judge them as important. If not, question what value they actually contribute with.

”But how do I know what is important?”

Well, that sounded simple enough, now didn't it? But, how do I know and determine what's important? Is there really an objective, absolute truth? No. But isn't it so that what strongly affects the possibility to take our business where we want it to go and what would be a step to getting there, is what is considered important?

So, if you are familiar with your company's vision (you might even have defined it yourself) and what it translates into when it comes to your particular area of responsibility, and you also know what goals you or your department need to achieve to know you are on the right track, you will easily be able to determine what activity is important and what isn't.

”But I'm swamped right now!”

To be able to prioritize you need to know what activities and tasks you have to choose from. This means that you need to have an overview of all your options, of all the things you need to do, regardless of what time-frame the task has. So make sure you have gathered all your to-do-tasks in one single place, in a single list or in one program on your computer.

But just because you get all the tasks out in the open and get an overview, that in itself doesn't give the overview meaning. You probably have so many things you could do that you need to sort all tasks into different categories (either by context, by specific project, by client, or in some other appropriate category), so that it's not just a mess of tasks. Then you might even be able to sort every category, so that you in the end only have say three tasks within the category you want to work with right now, which you need to choose and prioritize between, instead of all the 200 large and small items you in total have on your list.

Do this

Do this to easier prioritize with ease and spontaneity in your workday:

Draw the ”Urgent-Important”-matrix (or download it here)
Paste it on your screen, on the desk or someplace else where it catches your eye every day (or, laminate it in credit card-size and carry it with you in your pocket or wallet)
As soon as you are put in the position of having the opportunity to do a particular task (perhaps a colleague just dropped it off), determine where in the matrix the task belongs (urgent-important, urgent-not important, not urgent-important, not urgent-not important)
Compare the placement of the task in the matrix with all the other tasks you have to get done
How does it look in comparison? Is that the next task in line to have the highest priority?

A no to something is a yes to something with higher priority

If you use the ”Urgent-Important”-matrix daily, you will easier be able to determine what the right thing to do right now is. You will also keep your conscience clear when you say ”no” to a new task in the situations when you really want to do so, since you now know you have made the priority based on the company's goals both in the longer as well as in the shorter perspective.