How to Prioritize

“What happened? How did I get here?”

Julie wondered as she waited in the doctor’s office for a prescription to help her get some sleep. Her life had been consumed with competing priorities, constant technology, and the dominating self-talk of “I can get it all done” and “Everything is important.”

This self-inflicted reflection time made her realize that she needed to do a better job at prioritizing.

“I want my life to be consumed with activities, meetings, and endless work. I want to work so hard that I don’t have time to think about what is important.” – Says no one ever.

This frenetic pace of juggling and running is at the core of many of our problems.

• We spend so much time working that we develop health issues.
• The pressure of increasing demands at the office makes us appear as strangers to our family members.
• We take on too many projects and find ourselves overworked and underdelivering.

How do we prioritize effectively? The answer, prioritization is a process, not a one-time event. I like to think of it as a compass that we periodically check throughout our day, week, and month. And if we don’t check it regularly, there is a good chance we will be headed somewhere we don’t want to be. When we don’t prioritize we start to feel helpless, thinking, “My life is not mine and I don’t have a choice.”

Choose vs. Complain
Do you take ownership for prioritizing your day or continuously complain how out of control it is?
If you are of the mindset that you can’t influence your day, then don’t even attempt to prioritize. You will be left with some disempowering thoughts like, “Why bother on planning my priorities, they are just going to get put aside by my boss?”

Instead, start by identifying your top three priorities at work and those of your boss. Guess if you have to. This type of focus will allow you to start to see your contribution more visibly. In a Harvard Business Review article, Stop Chasing Too Many Priorities, the research found that as an executive team’s priority list grew company revenue declined.

Getting Distracted vs. Going Deep
The reason why some people feel stuck is that they haven’t generated enough momentum in any one direction.
Can our people do deep work? That is interruption-free focus periods of 25 minutes. Or have we created a culture of constant noise and interruptions like, “Hey, did you get my email?” What activities or projects would benefit from deep work? Today people and organizations are moving a hundred things an inch rather than four things a mile.

Use future-based reflection. What did we do last month or quarter that was impactful? Now, if we look back on this month what will our answer be?

Filter vs. Collect
Collecting information can be useful at work or on a project but not having a filter system can be detrimental.
Our need to be kept in the loop can fill our inbox with never-ending emails and stuff our calendar full with meeting after meeting.
And this can all lead to paralysis by analysis.
Being able to filter through data, activities, and meetings to discover the vital few among the trivial many is crucial.
When Joseph Juran, a business management consultant, went to help organizations in Japan in the 1950s he discovered how focusing on a few activities could significantly improve the quality of their products. He called this The Law of the Vital Few which has also become know as the 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle.

Prioritizing is a learned skill and the antidote to the myriad of choices and distractions in today’s complex and ever-changing world.

by Eric Papp Time Management Speaker