Every day we have to do many tasks related to work, home, and family. But we also want to give time to ourselves and just relax. In such a flow, it’s difficult to understand what is important and what to do first.
By nature, we tend to choose the path of least resistance. This means that we tend to push the most complicated, difficult and unpleasant tasks to the back of the schedule and do something easy and fun first. Those dreaded tasks get pushed further away, unfulfilled, and gradually accumulate. Our sense of control starts to wane, our self-esteem drops, and our stress levels rise, resulting in health problems. That’s why it’s so important to learn to prioritize, as it helps you allocate your time properly and see things through to completion.
What’s the Point of Prioritization
Prioritization is a key concept of time management, which means priority and importance.
Prioritization is a universal principle that is suitable for any time management system. It works at all levels of planning, from daily activities to life values and attitudes. Often people struggle with prioritizing daily tasks. Prioritization helps you understand what to do first and what can wait.
It’s important to realize that prioritization isn’t about doing as much work as possible, but about achieving goals without putting in excessive effort. Simply put, if you’re doing everything, getting tired a lot, but the results are never getting closer, you need to rethink your priorities.
It’s also worth noting that in situations like this, the solution to the problem may not be limited to just prioritizing things in your daily schedule. You may need to re-prioritize at a higher level. For example, you have a job that takes up almost all of your time. The question to ask is: Is it worth it? Is it worth the stress and will the effort pay off?
Lack of adequate rest can make your health worse and you may need medical attention in the future. Evaluate whether you are prioritizing your career and work or your health. If you feel happy right now, then your priorities are right.
Don’t think that prioritizing is the domain of managers, entrepreneurs and businessmen. Every day each of us has to prioritize, from simple household chores to work issues. The ability to prioritize correctly is a skill that determines personal effectiveness and achievement of key goals.
Benefits of Prioritizing
Our resources are strictly limited. As we work, we gradually become tired, slower to think and less motivated. There cannot be more than 24 hours in a day, and some of them are required for rest and sleep. Businesses will always be short of finance, materials, brains and free hands.
If we want to achieve our goals, it’s necessary to properly allocate the available resources. Prioritizing allows us to focus our time and efforts on the most important things.
The tasks we perform are heterogeneous. Some of them affect physical, psychological and financial well-being, while others do not affect anything. Paying the most attention to the cases from the first category will help us achieve greater results and get to our goals faster. Cleaning your apartment and learning a new lesson in an online course will take a couple hours, but just one of these tasks will get you closer to your new position.
Drowning in a crazy amount of things to do has become quite normal for modern man. However, our bodies haven’t kept up with adapting to the new environment, and we regularly stress over the piled up to-do’s.
Proper prioritization filters incoming tasks, helping separate the really important ones from those that can be postponed or not done at all. In this way, schedules become balanced, overall stress levels are reduced, and productivity increases.
Have you ever met successful but unhappy people? In many ways, happiness depends on having the right priorities in life. Outstanding results at work and fast career growth won’t make you happy if you dream of building a strong family. Only by focusing on what is really important can we get what we want from life.
There are different levels of prioritization, and the methods can be similarly divided into objectives, goals, and values. Adapt one or another technique to your needs. Techniques can be combined, individual elements can be combined with each other or you can create your own individual prioritization system on the basis of several.
One of the simplest methods that can be used to assess priorities in any area of life. For example, ask yourself the question, “What’s most important to me in my work?” and write down everything that comes to mind. The resulting list is your real priorities. Maybe you thought that the most important thing for you is the salary, but in fact you need a flexible schedule and the ability to take time off at any time. This way you can find out what is most important to you in life, relationships, family, etc.
Take a sheet of paper and write the word “life” in the center, draw some blocks next to it and write down the associations that first come to your mind and connect them with the word “life”.
Don’t think about the wording. They can be simple nouns, verbs, phrases or whole sentences. Then next to each block, draw a few more and write down the associations associated with them. Continue as long as new associations arise.
You can add different levels of association between goals by using dotted lines, colors, etc. To buy a new apartment, you need to get a good job, and that requires getting a sought-after specialty. The most important goal will be the one on which the others are most dependent.
This approach is often practiced in psychology. A list is made of the major areas of your life or what you consider important. For example, family, health, career, friends, hobbies, finances, spirituality. Put a number from 1 to 10 opposite each one. Ideally, you should get the same values, which indicates balance. If some spheres fall out, it’s necessary to correct it.
To do this, set a few tasks related to the sagging area. Think about which sphere makes you sacrifice others, why it happens. For example, let’s take such a situation: a 50-year-old man has to work overtime to the detriment of his health. He is not interested in building a career, and he works a lot because he is helping his adult children. To restore the balance, we need to understand what makes him continue to support his children.
To prioritize tasks, you need to write them down somewhere. This can be a notebook, calendar, electronic day planner or task manager. Be sure to write out all the things that need to be done. Let’s say you have 15 things to do on your list. Now it’s important to highlight the ones that are valuable and the ones that can be postponed or eliminated without harming your life.
The matrix suggests categorizing tasks according to importance and urgency criteria. It’s represented by foursquares:
Important tasks with burning deadlines are sent to the first box. Tasks from the third box can be delegated, and those from the fourth box need to be evaluated and filtered once again. Some of them can be safely removed. Special attention is paid to important and non-urgent tasks, as they pose the greatest danger.
It may seem that since they aren’t urgent, they can wait, but this is where the main nuance lies. The closer the deadline is, the more tasks from the second square will fall into the first one. Over time, a huge list will form, which will be impossible to cope with without exhaustion.
The highest priority is given to the tasks from the first square, the lowest — to the fourth. The priority of the second square is higher than that of the third, but the difference between the tasks is determined not by the order of execution, but by their time-consumption. The tasks of the second square should take more time.