Prioritize Your Priorities

 Prioritize Your Priorities

Here is the seven-point system that might work for you:

Remember the big picture. A good foundation for setting your
priorities is to draft a list or statement about what matters most.
Gina wrote a “career vision,” which was basically a list of her key
values and work-life goals. It included items like, “nurture my
team members,” “stay current in my field,” and “have time for a
rich social life.” Gina keeps a copy of her vision with her calendar and looks at it during her weekly priority review session.

Prioritize work categories. Gina knew that the items on her

lengthy task list weren’t equally productive. But she tended to

vacillate in gauging their importance. Her particular problem

was that she was easily sidetracked by other people’s sense of

urgency. She decided to keep her assignments on a steady course

by sorting activities into these four categories:

Tier One: Important to her bosses, to their goals, and to

their success.

Tier Two: Important to the goals and the success of her

direct reports.

Tier Three: Related to her routine management responsibilities,

like human resource and budget matters.

Tier X: Stuff that could be done by other people.

Create a daily “List of 3.” A technique that made a big difference

in Gina’s efficiency was her new practice of starting every

morning with a list of three tasks that must be done by day’s end.

These are the items that are so useful or important that their

completion may make the day a success, no matter what else

happens. She writes the list on an index card and posts it where

she’ll see it frequently.

Schedule time for high priorities. Gina makes standing

appointments with herself and blocks out time on her calendar

for both her List of 3 and tasks related to her Tier One projects.

Because she feels most productive in the morning, she often sets

aside and closely guards a block of time between 10 o’clock and

noon. On some days she’ll use this precious time block to concentrate on a single project, and on others, she’ll spend hours

moving quickly through a number of small steps for a variety of

important assignments.

Schedule low-value time for lower-value work. Administrative

and other routine tasks may be of lower priority than your major

projects, but they still have to be completed in a timely way.

Because Gina feels less efficient late in the day, she sets aside some

afternoon hours for handling this kind of work. She often makes

a game of it by seeing how fast she can speed through her list.

And she rewards herself, sometimes by leaving a little early, when

she completes certain tedious reports.

Find the biggest bang for your buck. Some things aren’t the top

priority in the grand scheme of things, but they’re worth doing

immediately because of how much trouble they’ll save you in the

long run. For example, if you suspect that a quick explanatory

meeting would allow you to calm down a disgruntled colleague,

you might want to add it to your list of 3. If you wait, the problem

may fester and ultimately the misunderstanding will require

much more of your energy to resolve.

Get rid of clutter. Some activities on your “to-do” list or calendar

just aren’t of high enough priority to be worth doing. Yet

they tend to linger on your list, sometimes distracting you or

making you feel guilty. It can feel liberating to get real about

your odds of finishing these low-value action items. Gina now

scrutinizes her calendar and task list for this kind of clutter and

says it feels great to delete it.

As you go through your evaluation process, ask yourself questions such as these:

→→ How would I rank the relative importance of these items?

→→ How do they relate to this year’s top performance objectives to my most important long-term career goals?

→→ Is this both urgent and important? Or just urgent?

→→ What will happen if I don’t get this done?

→→ What does my boss or client want most from me?

→→ What actions will assure that this is a productive day?

→→ What will I learn from this? Will it help me to grow?

→→ Will this help me build or improve relationships with other

          people?

→→ Could this expand my business or job description?

→→ What will it take to make this a success?