When you prioritize your tasks, you are able to meet deadlines, achieve goals and be in control of your own life. Three things everyone wants to do. I am pretty consistent in accomplishing goals I set for myself. So I wrote this quick post so that you can also prioritize your tasks and meet deadlines successfully.
Why you need a superlist
One huge list consisting of all the tasks that you must complete, irrespective of whether they are personal or professional, is a superlist.
In my previous post I had talked about why you need to have a superlist of all your personal and professional commitments. Primarily because it helps you create effective schedule and customized to do lists without forgetting an important task or missing deadlines. Here is just a short recap of the post to put things in perspective before we delve into how to prioritize super list tasks.
You should have only one superlist, and not separate ones for personal and professional. Superlist helps in being more organized, stress free and in control. Having a single superlist also makes it easier to prioritize tasks. When scheduling your calendar, you can take care of both personal and professional commitments simultaneously.
Let’s just dive in and see how we should prioritize superlist tasks.
Is your task time sensitive or goal sensitive
Prioritization of any task must be based on how time sensitive or goal sensitive it is. If a task is time sensitive, it means it must be completed within a stipulated time frame, usually a short one. And a task that takes you closer to your goals, be it long term or short term, are what I call goal sensitive tasks.
The spontaneous reaction of someone prioritizing a list is to complete the urgent tasks first. This habit is single handed responsible for most of our time management woes.
Always taking up the urgent tasks first becomes such a habit that we forget about the goal sensitive tasks. The goals we have set for ourselves keep getting postponed indefinitely and we feel frustrated and not in control of our own lives. The ideal situation here is to have a balance between the two so that you are able to move closer to your goals. Achieving goals is important for your happiness and sense of fulfilment.
What is urgent and what is important
We now have the knotty problem of how to choose between time sensitive and goal sensitive tasks.
For this we will turn to President Eisenhower, who said:
I have two kinds of problems: urgent and important. The urgent are not important and important are never urgent.
Dwight D Eisenhower
He further said that it is often observed that the tasks that are urgent for you are important for someone else. So, when you are completing urgent tasks you are actually helping someone else accomplish their goals. At the cost of accomplishing your own goals. Now it’s up to you what you want to do. Achieve your own goals or keep helping others achieve their own goals.
When you read this the first time you might find it offensive but ponder over it and you will realize it’s not too far off the mark.
Let me give you an example.
You are in the middle of your work and your boss suddenly materializes at your desk. Since they have taken the pains to visit you rather than summoning, it’s obvious they want a favor!! You are told that they have shared a folder containing team reports and you must prepare a presentation of 10-12 slides by the end of the day. This is an urgent task because it must be completed in a short time frame.
What you need to understand here is that task is important for your boss because probably they have to give that presentation.
I am not suggesting that you should not do what your boss assigns out of the blue, which is not even in line with your own profile. I just want you to be aware of whether you are doing an urgent task or an important one. Because knowledge is power, and once you have the knowledge you can do something about your situation.
May be take help of someone else or cite a more important project as a valid excuse. Remember that the boss will be able to find someone else to do their work but you have to fend for yourself.
Let’s come back to Eisenhower’s Principle of Time Management. In President Eisenhower’s parlance time sensitive tasks are urgent and goal sensitive tasks are important
How to choose between urgent and important
Setting priority on a scale of 1 to 3, we have three set of tasks that must be completed:
Priority 1 — both urgent and important
Priority 2 — important but not urgent
Priority 3 — urgent but not important
You will notice that I have not included the “Neither important nor urgent” tasks in the priority list. This is because there is no need to waste time in doing tasks that are important neither for you nor someone else. In case you are wondering if there could not be any such task, think again. I am not going to mention watching TV or Surfing the net again because I have antagonized enough people by talking about them in my book 24 hours are enough (shameless plug, I know, but couldn’t help it).
Sometimes people think that all urgent tasks must be finished first and they exchange definition of Priority 2 and 3. But my point is, ideally you should not bother with tasks that are not important. But if that’s not possible, at least keep the definitions of Priority 2 and 3 as I explained just now. That is important but not urgent are priority 2. They must be finished before priority 3 tasks, those that are urgent but not important.
That is how you ensure that you are moving closer to your goals by doing the important tasks while completing your daily jobs too. Take my word for it, accomplishing those important tasks will give you more thrill and joy than the everyday urgent tasks that you must complete. Another point that I want to make is that if you stick to prioritizing, scheduling and accomplishing all your task regularly, you should not have tasks that are both urgent and important on your superlist. Unless they pop up suddenly. Something like the example I gave just now. One can’t really predict what the boss’s priority schedule looks like.
What after prioritization
Once you have the priority of each task on the superlist, you need to move them to your calendar so that you can actually get them done. Ideally you should try to schedule all priority 1 tasks to the next day. If not, fit priority 1 tasks in your schedule for the week and then move on to priority 2 and 3 tasks.
That was all for today about prioritizing tasks. If you want to know more, drop a comment and I promise to respond.
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