Overview
We face a daunting number of tasks to complete – decisions to make, deadlines to hit, meetings to attend, and messages to respond to. How should we decide what to focus on? While company culture and standard business processes can dictate much of it, there’s still a lot left to consider. Taking a systematic approach to prioritizing your tasks can be a huge weapon for being productive, not just being busy.
In this article, we’ll discuss the components of the productivity flowchart above and how you can determine what is necessary, important, urgent, and impactful.
Is it necessary?
So much work that people do isn’t really necessary at the end of the day. Maybe it was at one point. Maybe it never was. Maybe it’s just “the way it’s always been done.” At any rate, paying attention to the tasks that add no value is crucial. Here are three questions to ask to help determine if a task is necessary:
1. Is it related to a compliance requirement?
If there is a legal or other compliance requirement, it’s probably necessary! Compliance tasks don’t always provide a ton of value (outside of avoiding fees and staying in business!), so completing them as efficiently as possible while ensuring you meet all the requirements is important.
2. Does it support important decisions?
A lot of employee time tends to be spent in meetings, building reports, or performing analysis to support decisions. Many of these tasks are temporary but recur weekly, monthly, etc. The problem is when we keep doing them despite the true need. Doing a routine audit of meetings, reports, analysis, and really any time spent can save a lot of time! Eliminate as much unnecessary recurring work as you can!
3. Is it material?
In accounting, the term materiality is used to decide if something is important enough to make a difference in the mind of a reasonable user of financial statements. That same concept can be used to determine if a task is even necessary. Is it worth having employees review for $1 discounts when the value of their time spent reviewing is more than $1? At what point do we care if something happens or not? Taking a materiality approach can make a huge difference for enhancing productivity!
Is it important?
Once you determine that a task is indeed necessary, it’s time to determine how important it is. While it might seem like everything is important, we can’t do everything (especially alone!), so we must prioritize 🔗. Here are three questions to ask yourself if a task is important:
1. Is it closely related to your goals?
A good chunk of your time should be related to achieving your goals. This one can be tough depending on whether your goals are related to your personal development or completing a particular project. Ideally, you should have some of both on your list of SMART goals. The more closely related a task is to your goals, the higher it should be considered on your to-do list.
2. Does it align with a core value or strategic initiative?
Core values 🔗 aren’t just clutter on the wall in the breakroom – they have a tremendous influence on company culture. They can also be a great signal internally as to what is important and how we should prioritize. For example, if customer service is a core value and you have some tasks related to external or internal customers, they should probably be prioritized higher.
3. Can it help free up time for other tasks?
Another great way to determine if a task is important is whether it can help you accomplish other tasks by making them quicker or easier. While this often means automating them, it can also just mean redesigning the process to cut out some steps, reorder them, or reassign them while considering how they might be automated. Allocating some time to continuous improvement like this is crucial for keeping everyone productive! Reevaluating processes every year or so is helpful because things change so rapidly.
Is it urgent?
Once you’ve identified your most important tasks, consider how urgent they are. This doesn’t mean that the most urgent task should be your highest priority – that’s often a way to get stuck in constant firefighting and never tackle the important stuff. Balancing important and urgent is often a must. Here are three questions to help determine urgency:
1. Does it have a hard deadline coming soon?
Deadlines drive even the worst of procrastinators – perhaps that’s why we have them! If we didn’t, things would never get done. A trap to avoid here is to not attack a task until it becomes urgent. Being proactive can help ensure you have the capacity to take on important tasks as they come up. If a task doesn’t have a deadline, assign one. It’s a psychological trick that instills urgency.
2. Will it create a bottleneck?
Even without a formal deadline, urgency still exists if not completing a task will mess up other tasks and processes. It’s often very helpful to document processes in a flowchart or some other visual so you can see the big picture and see potential bottlenecks in play. Tasks that would create delays and other issues if not completed should probably be prioritized higher.
3. Will it cause more work if not tended to now?
There are often tasks that come up that if not addressed, huge issues occur. Here’s an example: there’s a leak at your restaurant. If it’s a small drip, no big deal – probably not that urgent. But if it’s a steady leak, it could result in a huge water bill or worse – a flood that could shut down the restaurant. It might require some judgment determining if this kind of task is urgent. If so, consult your manager, mentor, peers, or other resources at your disposal.
Does it affect other people?
Once you filter down tasks that are necessary, important, and urgent, you still might need to prioritize them. One other consideration is how many other people are affected. Here are three questions to help determine the extent that your task affects other people:
1. How many people will your task directly touch?
Sometimes it’s obvious – you’re building (or fixing!) an application, reference guide, or training course for lots of people – sounds like it’s a high priority! It could be a newsletter or important announcement – that can also directly touch a lot of people. The more people that are directly touched, the higher a task should probably be prioritized.
2. How many people are in the workflow?
Will several people review the output of your task as a part of a process workflow? Working backwards from the ultimate workflow due date is helpful for determining your own due date if one isn’t already established. Don’t put other people under pressure if you can avoid it – giving them as much time as possible is a huge form of respect!
3. How much is someone else relying on you?
Even if just one other person is relying on you, that might be enough to prioritize a task higher, especially if they are stuck. If you are a people leader, this is likely the world you live in all the time. Keeping your team productive, trained, and engaged is your biggest priority!
Summary
Here’s one last wild suggestion after all the considerations above: ask AI. The prompt-based AI tools out there are getting extremely good at providing relevant, contextual answers. The more details you give them about your role and your scenario, the better. If nothing else (as I find constantly), you may find a thought or two you hadn’t yet considered.
Prioritizing is a mix of art and science. Taking a systematic approach, combined with your unique experiences and learnings, will help you succeed. By accounting for whether tasks are necessary, important, urgent, and affecting other people, you can focus on your biggest priorities, maximize your productivity, and provide a lot of value. Remember, better beats perfect! It takes practice to excel at prioritizing!
How do you prioritize your tasks in order to be productive? What would you change in the flowchart above? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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