Prioritisation

Setting priorities is a decision-making process by which you rank, in order of importance, the tasks you or your staff members must do. By completing the tasks on your list in order, you will achieve your goals. It sounds easy, but it is not. In fact, priority-setting and sticking to the agreement you make with yourself will be major challenges for you as a manager.

Click here to view a short story about prioritisation.

Effective time managers quickly realise that they simply cannot do everything that is available to them.

They must be selective with their limited amount of time and consciously choose to spend it on what is most important to them.

One important principle to keep in mind is that whenever you start a task, you are automatically rejecting everything else you could have done with that time.

Therefore, it is so important for you to be the one choosing, rather than just going with the flow and allowing circumstances or other people to choose for you.

Prioritising means taking conscious control of your choices and deciding to spend more time on the projects and tasks that are important and valuable and less time on the ones that are not as important or valuable.

This may sound obvious, but the fact is that most people don’t put much thought into how they spend their time.

They just flow through life doing whatever grabs their attention next or repeating the same things day after day out of habit and routine.

It will help you achieve your goals if you identify your priorities. To do this, look at your workload and decide on a priority rating for each activity. These can usually be categorised under three headings:

• Essential tasks - high impact on business. Tasks, which if you did not perform them, you would not fulfil your role effectively. These are the tasks that you must do.
• Desirable tasks - less impact on objectives and performance. These are usually the things that never get done - for example, the things you want to implement that would improve things but don't have the time for.
• Non-essential tasks - low priority. These include things we like doing and/or tasks that are easy and fun. These usually get done first.

List the tasks facing you under these headings. Look at your list and assign time to what you must do (essential) and what you would like to do (improvements). This helps you to eliminate activities which you like doing, but which are not essential. It also allows you to decide to do a non-essential, but enjoyable, task from time to time in the full knowledge that it is not high priority, but that you are doing it as a reward for doing longer, more complex tasks.

Once you have identified where your priorities lie, try not to stick so rigidly to them that you cannot change course if circumstances should dictate. Be flexible! Situations can change dramatically and cause your current priorities to become irrelevant. Sticking to them in these circumstances can only waste time.

However, should a priority activity disappear (for instance, a meeting is cancelled) watch out that you do not simply fritter the time away. Use the energy you had summoned for that task to tackle another task on your list.

Click here to view a video on time and productivity management.

After the activity we will discuss different methods of prioritising work.