How To Prioritise Effectively

Let’s begin with a fact. You have far more tasks to complete than time available. You will never change that unless you are prepared to give up everything — your work, your family, and friends and live in the middle of a desert.

Beginning with this fact, we need to find a way to make sure that the tasks we do each day are meaningful, move projects and goals forward and leave us feeling satisfied at the end of the day.

Prioritisation starts at the top

The art of prioritisation begins at a higher level: you need to know what you want. What do you want to achieve with your career or business? Your social and family life and your own goals? Being clear about these makes decision-making easier.

If you do not know what you want, you will find that everything that comes across your desk is a priority because there is no context to decide. You will revert to basic human needs — the need to please and the fear of missing out (FOMO), none of which lead you anywhere positive.

To help establish your priorities, I created a FREE workbook that will identify your areas of focus. I urge you to download this and spend a little time going through it. Once you know what your focus areas are, you want to get these into your system and have them recur as often as they need to recur.

For instance, your health and fitness. No matter where you are with your health, all of us need to make sure we are protecting it. If we are a bit overweight, we must act to reduce our weight. If our diet is a mess, and we are eating far too many toxic foods — processed grains, sugar and refined carbohydrates — we need to take steps to remove these from our diet.

Once you know what you want — what’s important to you — and these are embedded as repeating non-negotiable tasks in your task manager, the next step is to make decisions about the work you do. This is likely where your most variable tasks come from.

Understanding your core work

Here, you need to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do? The clue is often in your Job title. Are you a salesperson? A teacher? A designer? Illustrator or lawyer? Your core work in these examples is to sell, teach, design, illustrate or provide legal advice. This means that you are doing what you are paid to do whenever you are selling, teaching or designing.

When you are called into town hall meetings by your boss or asked to complete time-consuming sales reports, you are not doing your core work. I would even go as far as to argue teachers completing attendance reports are not doing their core work. Attendance reports help admin staff; they don’t help the people you are teaching to learn anything.

In great companies, you don’t get promotions or pay raises because you are good at gossiping or fast at replying to messages and emails. You get promoted based on your results doing the work you are employed to do.

Make sure you are prioritising the work you were employed to do. Spend a good part of your workday in front of your customers and potential customers or designing products or teaching and developing teaching materials that will benefit your students. Any work related to these activities will always be your priority.

Once you know what you want, what you are employed to do and make sure your daily activities are focused on these, you will quickly learn where your focus is best applied. Make sure you use your calendar to block sufficient time out to do this work.

The sales example

Imagine you are a salesperson. Your job is to sell, so you would block out two or three hours each working day to focus on contacting prospective customers and clients (your pipeline). You would also schedule a good part of your day to talk with your existing customers.

That takes care of your core work. However, while doing sales admin and responding to non-sales related emails may not be part of your core work, they are still a part of your job, so you would dedicate a fixed amount of time for dealing with your admin and communications.

Managed well, you would have plenty of time each day for each of these activities while prioritising the work that drives your core work forward.

Automatic prioritisation

When you are clear about what you want and have defined core work activities, prioritising becomes almost automatic. Any task or activity that does not directly support either of those will not be a priority.

Bringing all this together is the weekly and daily planning sessions. During these sessions, you review your tasks, the commitments you have and decide where best to apply your time. Again, you base these decisions on how any of these requests or activities will assist you with your goals and core work.

Prioritising is not a science. It is an art, and you will get better the more you practice it. Knowing what you want, what you are employed to do and being disciplined enough to make sure you spend most of your time working on these activities will lead you down roads that take you to greater heights with a lot less stress.

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My purpose is to help as many people as I can live the lives they desire. To help people find happiness and become better organised and more productive so they can do more of the important things in life.

If you would like to learn more about the work I do, and how I can help you become better organised and more productive, you can visit my website or say hello on Twitter, YouTube or Facebook and subscribe to my weekly newsletter right here.