Day 76 — Productivity series 3/7: “Managing Priority”
“Where do we start?” It’s one of the most common questions we heard when we’re dealing with large amount of tasks. From yesterday’s article, we learned about how to manage goals to ensure we’re investing our time and energy on important things and being productive. Today, we’re going to dig a little bit deeper to understand how we can prioritize our work, de-prioritize some others, so that we can enhance our productivity holistically.
In this article, I’m going to breakdown the content in the following structure:
- Priority Principles
- Eisenhower Matrix
- Task Management Tips
Priority Principles
There are many priority settings tool and framework. Let’s start with the general principle of how to set priorities:
- What is important: an obvious criterion when prioritizing work;
- What is urgent: might not be an important task, but requires our immediate attention. For example, send my document to my team mate;
- What is helpful: also doesn’t have to be an important task, but is beneficial from a planning perspective; for example, take a break, or stretch you leg;
- What is ready: sometimes the important things might not be ready for us; some low hanging fruit in that case can be helpful to pick up;
- What is mandatory: whether important or not, there are things we need to do. For example, policy driven work;
- What is risky: risky work needs extra planning & detailed attention, therefore we need to first decide if it’s necessary, and also determine the amount of effort and prioritize accordingly
Eisenhower Matrix
It’s probably the most popular task prioritization tool people share or use. It’s as simple as asking two questions: “What task is important?” And “what task is urgent?” According to Wikipedia, “Eisenhower Method” stems from a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
By cross referencing the answers of these two questions, a simple matrix is created as the figure below. Simply put all the tasks you’re aware of in the appropriate quadrants, and you’ll have a clearer mindset how you can manage them. Also, it’s helpful to have your Goal List and Vision Board next to you so that you can better determine what is important and what not.
Once you put all the tasks in the matrix, it gives you a better sense of: 1) what you should focus on, and 2) how you can handle them. The way Eisenhower Matrix handle tasks in the 4 quadrants are as the figure below.
- #1: Urgent + Important: Probably a no-brainer, just do it.
- #2: Not Urgent + Important: Since it’s important, you want to make sure you’re somehow “on top of it”. Even if you don’t have time to do it, at least plan for when to do it and how to do it.
- #3: Urgent + Not Important: If it’s not important, an important step to take is to gradually remove/ block tasks in this quadrant so that you can focus on quadrant 1 & 2. A typical approach is to delegate, either to a real human or a machine (automation). For example, the service IFTTT (if this then that) creates cross-application task automation, so that you don’t have to do a lot of manual work.
- #4: Not Urgent + Not Important: Why is this their anything in this quadrant? Well, could be due-diligent work or mandatory tasks. Similar to quadrant 3, we want to delete those tasks so that we can invest our quality time to quality work.
The reason we use Eisenhower Matrix as a routine task prioritization process is because you can have control of your priorities and how to deal with all the tasks. During the process, a helpful way to streamline the tasks on your plate, is try to reduce the number of items in your Quadrant 1 box and focus on Quadrant 2. As former president once said:
“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you want to learn more about the step-by-step guide of using Eisenhower Matrix, check out Donita Brown’s good article “How to Use the Eisenhower Matrix for Radical Prioritization in Your Daily Life.” Also, if you want to lear more, below is YouTube video introducing Eisenhower Matrix:
Task Management Tips
Once you start tackling all the items in those quadrants, an important thing is to remember is to have a regular check-in to see how you’re doing in the Matrix. Sometimes what was important yesterday is no longer important today, and what’s urgent turned out flexible on time line. By reviewing it on a regular basis, we can start shuffle the tasks in the matrix and retrofit our plan of work.
In regards to the intake process, what should added into the matrix and what not, it’s crucial to remember that we only have limited time and resource. As writer Julie Morgenstern suggests “do’s and don’ts” of time management, it’s ok to Say “No”. By just saying “No” or “later” allow us to focus on important work and get them done. If you’re concerned about relationship management, you can either explain your resource constraints and priorities to the requestors, or you can ask them to clarify the “importance” & “urgency” so that it helps you to re-prioritize your work. A lot of times some of the “seemingly urgent” requests organically disappear if we wait for a day or two, same can be applied to “seemingly important” requests.
Conclusion
- Prioritization is crucial to productivity because we want to focus on the important work that yield the most results;
- A common way to prioritize tasks is Eisenhower Matrix: categorize tasks based on their importance and urgency;
- When we carefully monitor both the task output and intake, we can more effectively manage our throughput in a productive way.
What are some methods you use to prioritize your tasks?I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
