How do you prioritize your work?
Knowing your priorities at work will make you more productive and
save you from long work days. In this video,
I'm going to show you how to prioritize your tasks at work.
Stay tuned.
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You're probably here today because you want to
know how to prioritize your tasks at work
to be more productive or to be more effective. In any event,
I want to just jump right into it today.
The first step is to begin with the basics.
The first thing that you need to do in order to
prioritize your tasks is to get a general sense of what your actual priorities
are. This means that you're going to do two things. First of all,
you're going to look to the goals that you've actually set
for your professional growth.
If you haven't already set your professional goals,
I definitely recommend that you check out my goal setting video,
which I'll link up here and in the description down below.
You don't have to jump away and watch that one first,
but check it out if it is something that would help you.
The next thing that you need to have is the actual success metrics for your
role. If you've been with me for a while,
you know that I'm a big fan of having open conversation
surrounding success metrics before you even accept a job.
If you haven't overtly had this conversation with
your manager or human resources, or whoever sets them,
what I would suggest is actually going to your job description.
Your job description should include the key deliverables for your role.
Depending on what your role is, your success measures are going to be different.
You may have KPIs or key performance indicators.
You may have MBO. You may have quotas. There's all sorts of different measures.
Know what the actual measures are that you need to at least meet,
if not over-achieve,
in order for you to get where you actually want to get professionally.
Make sure that you take note of exactly what these are
because they are going to be very important for us to move into the next step,
which is to create your task list. No matter how you go about doing it,
you're going to take a list of everything that you do.
You can do this in a spreadsheet.
You can write it on a list of paper. Heck,
you can write it in hieroglyphics if that's what makes sense to you.
The important thing is for all of your goals and all of your requirements,
you need to define a list of every single task
that you need to undertake at any time in order for you to actually accomplish
that goal.
Don't forget to include the things that arise that you need to attend to.
It might be phone calls, it might be emails, it could be Slack messages.
Make sure that you take time to write down as many as possible.
I got my start on my list here,
but one thing that do want to point out is that sometimes it's
actually really hard for you to think about all of the tasks that you have going
on.
One thing that I recommend is as you work on this list,
is to make sure that you keep it beside you for a few days.
Then you can actually add to the list as you actually go about
your day to day work life and make sure that you've accounted
for the things that are coming up at least most often.
This is not going to be a full and exhaustive list about
everything that you actually potentially could be doing.
These are going to be the things that come up most frequently
that you're responsible for on a daily, weekly,
monthly basis so that you can effectively move into the next step,
which is to actually create your priority matrix.
I actually first learned about this in the seven habits,
which you might know is one of my favorite books
and it Stephen Covey lays out the four quadrants of urgent and important,
which I'm going to show you right here on my screen.
This is actually the same thing as the Eisenhower quadrants.
The addition that I do like about the Eisenhower quadrants
is that he also has the overlay of the tasks that you do,
the ones you decide,
the ones that you delay and the ones that you can just go ahead and forget
about. But we'll come back to that in just a minute. If you're like most people,
you're going to look at your tasks list and these quadrants,
and you're going to say everything is urgent and important -
and everything is going to end up in what we call Q1.
But the thing is we need to really be honest,
and take a look at our task list with a critical eye to determine
what is truly important and what is truly urgent.
Urgent and important tasks are things like an
urgent request from your boss, a client crisis, a technical outage.
These are all things that are both urgent and important for your company
as well as for your career success. What you may notice,
and it's probably going to be items that start to occur further down the list,
is you do have a lot of tasks that are important. In fact,
they may be a lot more important than some of the tasks that are living in Q1,
but they are not urgent and easy target for this one,
your own professional development.
super important but it feels really not urgent. Again,
some of the fires that you're fighting on a daily basis,
this is really the quadrant that we want to be working out of.
If you're following the seven habits and Stephen Covey's philosophy,
essentially Q two is where you're able to be proactive as
opposed to Q1 in which you're really being reactive in most cases
or maybe you ended up in that reactive state because you were procrastinating,
but that's a video for another day.
This is going to bring us into Q3,
which is our tasks that are not important but are urgent. Email, inbox,
Slack messages. I'm looking at you here.
Three is what I refer to as the time sink.
It's the time that you spend at work,
which is not actually moving the needle at all in terms of your career growth,
or really in terms of your company's longterm success,
but it's the tasks that are urgent. They do need to be done.
Or we at least have the sense that they need to be done.
And really going through this exercise and identifying the things
that are not important but are urgent is our first step
in being able to prioritize them effectively,
which of course we're going to come back to now. Finally,
we have the tasks that are not urgent and not important.
Think checking out your Instagram feed while you're at work. Wow,
I'm already live on my new website.
LOL. Cats.
These are the things that are essentially time wasters.
They offer no productivity. They have no level of urgency.
And if Q3 wasn't moving the needle,
these are probably going to be the tasks that are moving
the needle in the opposite direction from where we want to go.
With the priority matrix squared away,
you actually now know the things that you were supposed to be focusing on,
and are really going to have the best impact
for you as well as your company and your team.
What are we going to do with that information? First of all,
we need to find a way to move out of Q3 as much as possible.
So for all of the time wasters, and the time sinks, that you find,
is there a different approach or a different strategy
that you can take in order to essentially deprioritize these seemingly urgent
items?
This can be as simple as having dedicated work blocks
for checking your email and for checking and responding to Slack messages.
In the longterm, it is also things like saying no to work that isn't
actually going to be relevant to what you're doing.
Or not impactful to the career that you actually want to have.
If you are interested in a video about how you can say no at work
without being perceived as being a jerk, let me know in the comments.
With that aside, we can essentially forget about all of the not important tasks.
Or we can at least forget about them for the majority of our day,
which leaves us now in our Q1 and our Q2 are important tasks.
Your Q2 activities and your Q2 tasks are going to be the
things that have the most dramatic impact. No matter what you do.
These are things that you can actually plan against.
So one of the things that I'm a huge advocate for doing is
to actually schedule time in your calendar at the beginning of the
week to make sure that these are the things that you're actually focusing on.
You might not be overly specific. I was, you know, things happen,
workplaces vary.
And sometimes we just don't know how long something's going to take,
but know the things that you are supposed to be working on,
and when you are supposed to be working on them.
So if you find yourself with an extra 30 minutes because of a canceled meeting,
you're never sitting around wondering what should I be doing right now?
The other thing that you're going to do is you are
going to allocate time to deal with the urgent and important tasks
on a daily basis because these things are urgent, they tend to be crisises.
These are going to be things that we can't necessarily anticipate ahead of time.
However,
what we can do is we can leave time in our day in order to address these things.
This is going to allow us to address them in a very timely,
to assign them to the correct priority as they actually
come in and to do so without blowing aside every other actual priority that we
have. And finally,
we need to have an ongoing triage for our prioritization.
Because your task list is not finished.
You didn't write this list once and nothing is ever going to be added.
And when something's taken away, it's gone for good.
What we need to do for each thing that falls onto our plate,
is to actually take a look at, assign them the correct priority. Once again,
being honest with ourselves
about the true urgency of the true importance of the task at hand.
There is one thing that is certain in our modern world
and especially if you work in a fast moving industry like tech,
which is where I spent the vast majority of my career,
is that things change and they change quickly.
We need to be able to reprioritize our competing priorities
sometimes against each other so that we are focusing our time on the right
things. The more accurate that we are in terms of defining
our priorities and their urgency and importance,
the better we are going to be able to execute
against all of the things that we actually need to get done
and this has an added benefit of helping us see the things
that we really don't need to be doing or shouldn't be doing,
that we can start to ease our way out of.
I'm looking at you event planning committee.
Now that you know how to prioritize your tasks at work,
it's time to go and do it, but for this you really need the execution piece
to make sure that you're investing your time into the
most important things and that you're figuring out the habits to make it stick.
And that is one of the things that I actually help with in my private community.
The strive squad. If you are looking to elevate and accelerate your career,
I highly recommend that you check it out.
The link is in the description down below because
we can't talk about priorities without discussing competing priorities.
I wanted to include this bonus tip for you,
which is to actually seek validation from others,
especially if you do have two tasks that are truly urgent, truly important.
Let's just say that you have two clients that have
critical crisises and they are going to leave.
If you don't get that sorted out,
it is entirely possible that these two things do occur
once and if that does happen, what you need to do is you need to get assistance
from the people who also have accountability
within the scenario to make sure that you are choosing
the right thing to work on. And if there is someone else that could be involved,
or pulled in to help facilitate an expeditious solution,
For that issue that that actually happens.
However, in most cases the competing priorities
that we feel actually do have a priority between them.
What we really need to think about when we're
faced with a competing priority is these three things.
How long the task is going to take,
the actual impact of doing so and how quickly the response
or solution is actually needed.
If something is fast to do extraordinarily high impact,
it might make sense to prioritize that and get that out of the way first
and deprioritize the task that's going to take longer. When in doubt,
focus on the impact and make that your top priority.
Bigger impacts generally are going to be the thing that is more important,
but I always recommend that you take the consideration of effort,
time and importance into consideration.
I hope that you feel skilled in understanding your priorities at work,
and you feel really confident now knowing how to prioritize your work.
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If goal setting was something that you did need to focus
on because you haven't set your goals get and obviously
that's going to be really important to setting your priorities at work.
Go ahead and click the video that I have on screen right
around here and it is actually going to bring you to that
video that I mentioned earlier on. Keeping being unapologetically ambitious,
keep investing in yourself, and of course,
thank you so much for watching this video.
Until next time, bye for now.