How to Prioritise Tasks

IntroThere are never enough minutes in the day. Balancing your personal life as well as your business can be a difficult task to accomplish and in most cases, one thing or another always gets pushed to the side. The way in which people try to get around this is by managing time, but is this the best way to accomplish everything?

In my opinion, it is the other way around.

You can never manage time, it is all about your goals and how much time you need to put into those prioritise. When I am struggling to balance my tasks I remember something I learnt years ago. I first write down all my tasks through brainstorming, then I separate my tasks into different quadrants.

Brainstorming

I end my days with a brainstorm, I write down everything that needs to be accomplished the next day, whether that be personal or professional. I then ask myself one simple question, ‘am I the best person to accomplish this task?’, if the answer is no I can delegate this to someone else.

This can minimise my list and I am left with the tasks that only I can accomplish, whether that be an email only I can write or a phone call only I can make.

I have found that this helps to reduce the amount of stress for the next day, and also motivates me to accomplish each task as I am not scurrying around the next day trying to find out what I should be doing.

Quadrants

After establishing what needs to be done, I then move onto organising my tasks into four quadrants:

• Urgent and important

• Important but not urgent

• Urgent but not important

• Not urgent and not important

These quadrants help you to organise your tasks, and you should be aiming to spend your time on important but not urgent tasks.

Why?

Once you introduce urgency, you are also introduced to stress. Your mind-set will change from focused and productive, to ‘this is so urgent, and important, so I need to get it done now!’ which can lead to rushed work and mistakes being made. You could even end up feeling so stressed that you put off doing the work altogether. 

Instead, change your mind set and begin focusing on, and asking yourself, ‘how important is this task?’

Once you have established the importance of a task/project/goal, you then need to prioritise these.

I hope this article helps you to organise your personal and professional life. I would love to hear your thoughts down below, or the methods you use to keep your life carefully balanced.

What are you doing that could be delegated?

Are you pushing aside what is important and focusing on what is urgent?

Wishing you growth and happiness,
Nyasha