Manage Priorities

Manage priorities to make sure your are getting the right things done. This means prioritizing your tasks.

You really know the basics of how to set priorities. It's all in deciding what's important to you. Then you will be more productive and effective.

Prioritizing is the difference between productivity and effectiveness. Productivity is how much you get done. Effectiveness is how valuable is the stuff you got done.

To manage priorities first manage your goals. You should have defined your life goals, your intermediate goals, your projects and activities.

Prep Work

Everyday, before you select the tasks for the day, review your short term goals. Keeping your goals in mind keeps you focused on results, not just checking off items on your 'to do' list.

Once a month review your big goals and make sure your short term goals are in line. Review your 'life purpose' or 'mission', then your lifetime goals, your long term goals and finally, your short term goals. Make adjustments to your short term goals if necessary.

The goals themselves need to be prioritized. You might have a goal to advance your career and another to improve your family life and another to exercise more. It isn't possible to do everything, so you must prioritize.

You can tell yourself different goals are equally important, but that you will devote more time and energy to one now and then switch next week or next year.

I remember when I got my first corporate job after college, I had dreams of climbing the corporate ladder. But I had 3 children under 10 years of age. I wanted to do be an involved parent, but also felt I needed to climb that ladder to provide better for them.

It took me a year to conscientiously decide to focus more on my kids and pursue my career after they were grown. Then when they were grown, I found I didn't want a corporate career. I didn't want big bucks and be buried in work. When I was younger, I couldn't see how appealing some other directions could be.

Now the big bucks aren't real appealing. Free time is more important. And I'm working to make that more flexible by using the Internet.

So, for Priority Management to work, you must decide on your goal priorities before you can prioritize your activities. And these priorities are yours, and yours alone. You are free to change them anytime and as often as you like. But realize that if you keep changing direction, you will never reach any goal.

Keep your goals in mind as you select the tasks for that day. Keeping your goals in mind keeps you focused on results, not just checking off items on your 'to do' list. You could be checking off a lot of items on your to-do list, but they are relatively unimportant ones. After all, the reason your doing all this is to help reach a goal you chose.

Determining priorities

The most basic part to manage priorities is to assign a priority to each task. Mark the all the Important top level tasks with an A, not so Important tasks with a B and the unimportant with a C. Then within each grouping number them 1-20 (or however many you have) with 1 being the most important. So A-1 is the activity you should do first and A-2 would be the next activity. And so on.

Most of the time, priorities are obvious. If one of your major life goals is a good family life then going to your child's soccer game is a higher priority than spending another hour on that report at work. But if you're going to get fired if you don't finish that report, you better stay and finish that report.

If you're really stuck on which task has priority here are some questions to ask yourself.

• What's the Best use of my time?
• Which item contributes to my goals?
• What has that greatest return for the time invested?
• What has the greatest threat if it doesn't get done?
• Which task does my boss think is a priority?
• Which task will make me feel best to have done?

There have been many times when I ranked various tasks from 1 to 10 for each question and summed the answers in order to determine which items really have priority and not just what I feel like doing (or avoiding).

Some of the items on your list will eventually get eliminated without being done because you decide it's just not worth the effort or maybe you changed your mind about something else that makes it inappropriate.

Say you've picked up some items with which to decorate but they need a little work. Then you change the theme of the room and those items just don't fit. You take the re-work of those items off your list.

Manage Priorities

Now that you've determined the priorities, you must manage them. Priorities change daily so you must review them daily. use a daily to-do list. task list or activity list to manage priorities. It doesn't mater what you call it as long as you do it in writing so you can refer to it throughout the day.

Interruptions and side tracks happen everyday. If your daily list id prioritized, you can easily recall what is important when you are ready to resume your work.

You received the estimate you were waiting on now you must finish the proposal. Prodding Larry for the estimate was a low priority when he said he'd have it by tomorrow. But when he got the estimate to you, the priority of the next action, writing the proposal went up.

Installing the new window treatments was a low priority until the order came in.

Over the years I've developed various tools to help me choose and track my priorities. I have an Microsoft Access Database that has columns for the response for each of the above questions and an Excel spreadsheet priority chart that I think was based on one I saw in the book "What Color is Your Parachute?"

Now I manage priorities by using 'ThinkingRock', a software for creating and maintaining to-do lists based on "Getting Things Done" (GTD) by David Allen. This doesn't help me determine priorities. For that I just ask myself the questions above and set the priority in the software after I determine the priorities.

Don't be put off by the time it takes to manage priorities. It's well worth it. It's easy to get caught up in doing little unimportant things like cleaning your desk for the 3rd time today, or answering e-mail that's not urgent or important, or just watching TV. All these things can eat up your time very quickly and delay or even prevent you from reaching your goal.

Now that you've determined your priorities, work them in order whenever you're in the right context. Context meaning being where you can work on a particular task. You can't be making a doctors appointment while you're in a business meeting. You don't work on a work proposal at a family birthday party. (see Getting Things Done).

Work your priorities

Do your tasks in order. Do NOT skip, or pick and chose. You've already decided what's the most important. Don't sabotage yourself and your future.

I know, there are excepts to every rule. You are working on a proposal right now, and were going to work on that report for your boss this afternoon. If your boss calls asking about that report, if you can get away with explaining That you were going to work on it this afternoon, by all means do it. But It's probably better to switch to working on the report. It's all part of manage priorities

Keeping your goals in mind helps you to manage priorities more effectively.