Setting work priorities are a difficult thing for many people to do. There are a great many techniques for managing time and setting priorities, and there are a great number of wonderful books on the topic.
I wanted to provide some pragmatic tips to assist in the overall management of your priorities. Could just as easily be ten, or twenty? Sure, but these five stood out the most.
1. Understand the Work Content
Before you can begin to set priorities, you need to understand what your work consists of. What do you and your team do? If you have difficulty with that, you’re unlikely to set priorities effectively.
This doesn’t mean you need to be able to actually do each work task. In fact, that’s an unreasonable expectation of any manager. What it does mean is that you need to understand what it is that is actually being done. Only with that level of understanding can you identify what should take the priority.
2. Make the Process Consistent and Reproducible
However you decide to set priorities, make sure you can repeat it consistently. You don’t want to have the same task take on different priorities on different days.
The key is to use a system, in any form, to determine priority. You might use a combination of the task urgency and scope, or some other measure. Don’t simply wave your finger about in the air and decide your priorities.
3. Leave soMe Room to Move
When you schedule your prioritised tasks, leave some “slack” periods. These will come in handy when urgent tasks come up, which they inevitably do.
If you fill your day completely, you’ll fall behind as urgent and unforseen tasks come to light. By setting aside this time, you’ll feel more in control and see better results. Don’t worry that people will be put off by your being unavailable at particular times, it’s a perfectly legitimate practice.
4. Deal With Tasks in Order of Priority
If you go through the effort to prioritise your tasks, make sure you actually deal with them in that order. It’s quite popular to set priorities, then ignore them, dealing with the exciting or “low hanging” tasks.
One thing about priorities is that the important things come first, not the easiest. Spend some serious time understanding what is important, and when it needs to be done. Taking the easy way out is a sure-fire way to fail.
5. Learn to Say No
One of the major elements to setting your priorities is determining when you are not willing or able to accept particular tasks. If you always keep saying yes, you’ll be doing so to the detriment of everything else.
Many people feel that saying no will reflect poorly on them. My opinion is that it doesn’t have to. All of us have finite limits to the amount we can accomplish, and anybody who doesn’t understand and accept that you have limits is simply being unreasonable.
Do you have some tips for setting your own priorities? Share them in the comments section below.
Saying NO is the most difficult word for quite a lot of people — me included. As such, I’ve got a really great reading on this — The power of a positive NO by William Ury. I just loved the learning I’ve got from it, and I’ve written about it — that’s how extraordinary it seemed to me.
I recommend it to every person having trouble saying NO, and thinking that it can mean a break in the relation.
http://projectmanager1.blogspot.com/2010/08/power-of-no.html