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Prioritize and Use the 80/20 Rule
Now you need to decide what to work on next. How do you get through it all without getting overwhelmed? Prioritization!
Effective time managers quickly realize that they simply cannot do everything that is available to them.
They have to be selective with their limited amount of time and consciously choose to spend it on what is most important to them.
One important principle to keep in mind is that whenever you start a task, you are automatically rejecting everything else you could have done with that time.
This is why it is so important for you to be the one choosing, rather than just going with the flow and allowing circumstances or other people to choose for you.
Prioritizing means taking conscious control of your choices and deciding to spend more time on the projects and tasks that are important and valuable, and less time on the ones that are not as important or valuable.
This may sound obvious, but the fact is that the vast majority of people don’t put much thought on how they spend their time.
They just flow through life doing whatever grabs their attention next, or repeating the same things day after day out of habit and routine.
The Pareto Principle or 80/20 Rule
In 1895, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto discovered what is now commonly called the Pareto Principle or the "80/20 rule".
While there are exceptions, his principle does seem to apply to all sorts of systems and groups including your projects and tasks: 80 percent of the total value is typically contained in only 20 percent of the items.
This is also true in time management because some tasks give you a much higher return on your investment than others.
The key to effective prioritization is to apply the 80/20 rule and discover the 20 to 30 percent of your projects and tasks that will give you the greatest returns on your effort.
Putting It Into Practice
Achieve Planner uses the ABCD prioritization system described above to help you categorize and rank your projects and tasks.
Prioritize Your Projects
You should start by prioritizing your projects (which represent your outcomes) based on their importance.
I normally assign an A priority to ongoing projects that I'm actively working on, as well as important long-term projects that I want to continue moving forward.
Your A projects represent outcomes that you have decided are important enough to commit time to on a regular basis.
I
then use ranking to add an element of focus to my projects. Those
that are both important and urgent get a high rank (A1, A2, A3,
etc.) For me, priority ranking identifies the items that I'm currently
focusing on.
I leave the rest of the projects with an unranked priority (A) to remind me that they are important, but not my top focus for this week.
The Weekly Planning module describes a simple mechanism you can use to allocate some time to projects with long-term importance. You would be surprised at how much progress you can make by giving even a small amount of time to your important long-term projects on a regular basis.
I assign a priority of B to projects that are “under review.” They may very well be worth moving forward, but they are not important enough to devote time to them this upcoming week. You can then revisit your decision during your next weekly planning process.
One common mistake while prioritizing is to automatically assign an A priority to urgent things, and to push back important long-term projects to B or even C status.
If a long-term project truly is important, you should make it an A and commit time to it on a regular basis.
I usually leave urgent but non-important projects/tasks as either B's or C's, which helps me to productively procrastinate on them until I can truly determine if they are worth doing. Since I review them regularly, I don't have to worry about them falling through cracks or becoming a crisis.
The C priority category represent projects that I may want to do at some point in the future, but definitely not right now. Once I’ve decided that a project is a C, I won’t even consider committing any time to it during the upcoming week.
Finally, I reserve the D priority for projects and tasks that I'm not planning to do at all. They are simply not worth my time.
Prioritize Your Tasks
Prioritizing tasks is slightly different than prioritizing projects. In general, projects are things that you are going to work in parallel during the week, so the project priorities help you decide which projects to work on, as well as how much time to devote to them.
On the other hand, you normally work on tasks for a given project sequentially. You work on the most important thing first until completed, and then you move on to the next most important thing, and so on. Task priorities help you decide the ordering of tasks within a given project.
While prioritizing sub-projects, tasks, and sub-tasks, you should assign priorities based only on how important the item is relative to its parent.
Let's say you have a project with four tasks. Three of them are important for the project and one is not that important. I would assign an A priority to the three important tasks irrespective of the priority of the project (i.e., even if the project is a B or C) and a B to the remaining task.
You don't need to worry about any other projects or tasks you may have, just consider how important the item is for its parent. Achieve Planner automatically takes the parent priority into account when comparing child items.
The same holds true for sub-tasks: prioritize them based only on their importance relative to the parent task.
When prioritizing tasks, I usually start by categorizing them into one of the ABCD labels without providing a rank.
Ranking the Items
Once I have assigned a priority label to all tasks, I focus on the A's and assign individual priority rank values to the top five to ten items: A1 for the most important, A2 for the next most important, and so on.
You can usually tell which of two items is more important just by looking at them.
If you are having trouble deciding, just ask yourself: “If I could only complete one of these but not both, which one would I choose?" Your choice represents the more important task.
If you think two tasks are equally important, just assign the same priority value to both of them.
If you have more than ten items at any given level, you don't have to assign rank numbers to all of them. Just rank the top five to ten items and leave the others with their general labels (A, B, etc.)
One important benefit of prioritizing is that it allows you to focus on your most important tasks without getting overwhelmed by everything that you need to do.
That's why I suggest you only rank five to ten items: it allows you to focus on a small number of tasks at any given time.
If you still find your large task list overwhelming or distracting, simply move more of your tasks to B or even C status.
Since Achieve Planner color-codes tasks based on priority, now I don't event notice the B's or C's while focusing on the A's.
Using Achieve Planner, you can even filter the task list based on priority to help you stay focused on your top tasks.
Updating Priority Values
When you complete all your ranked tasks (A1, A2, A3, etc.) for a project, you can choose the next five to ten most important items from your A's and rank them appropriately.
I usually like to quickly review my B's and C's whenever I complete all my ranked tasks, just to make sure that they are all in their rightful categories. You can use this quick review to upgrade any tasks that have gained importance into A status.
When you run out of A tasks, just go through your B's, and either choose the next set of A's, or delay working on them if they are not important enough for you to do right now.
Achieve Planner provides several convenient tools to help you deal with shifting priorities, and you can always update the priority value of any task directly in the grid.
The "Remove Priority Gaps" command is useful if when you've completed several of your top-priority tasks and you are left with "gaps" between priority values.
For example, you may have tasks with priorities of A4, A5, and A7. The Remove Priority Gaps command would reprioritize these tasks as A1, A2, A3.
Another useful command is "Reprioritize Unique" that you can use if you've assigned the same priority to multiple tasks. This command will make the selected task's priority unique and shift the priority of all the other tasks sharing the same value.
Additional resources:
» Perfectionism and gold plating worst practice - More details about the worst practices of perfectionism and gold plating.
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