I have a lot on my plate – multiple businesses, the blog, friends, family, hobbies and so forth. A problem I noticed recently is that sometimes my focus drifts to things I could’ve postponed and dealt with the more urgent things first.
This is an issue a lot of people have, regardless of being business owners/managers, and the key to success is in one word: Priority.
Let’s be totally honest, we all have things we don’t really like to do but they are essential, and we postpone them. We all know they’re important, we are all aware of that, and we all do it occasionally anyway.
So how do we get rid of this nasty habit?
I want to start with a nice story I once heard.
A professor walks into his class with a big empty jar and a large crate. The professor set the jar on his desk for all to see and started taking big stones from the crate and placed them in the jar. Once the stones reached the top of the jar he asked the class, “Is the jar full?”, most replied “Yes”.
He then took smaller stones from the create and placed them in the jar at the spaces between the large stones, when it reached the top he asked again, “Is the jar full now?”, the class replied yes with puzzled looks.
The professor raised a bucket of sand and started pouring it into the jar, the sand moved around the big stones and the small stones, and positioned itself in the empty spaces. When it reached the top, the professor asked, “Is it full?”, there was silence.
He took out a bottle of water and poured it onto the sand. The water filled the jar and the wet sand.
“Now it’s full”, the professor stated.
Jars with stones Let’s take that to the real world now. Prioritizing is a good overall practice, but sometimes unnecessary. If you have enough time to complete all of your tasks, and don’t foresee some unexpected events in the near future that will prevent that, go crazy with your picking. But sometimes, you won’t be able to fit everything in your schedule since you have a limited amount of hours during the day.
In this occasion you will have to prioritize, and bear in mind that some tasks won’t be completed by their deadline.
Steps to Prioritization:
1) Write down (or just think about) all of your tasks and set their absolute deadline
2) Write down the importance of each task ranging from “(1) Critical” to “(5) Low”
3) Write down how long each task will take
4) See if you can finish all of the tasks by their deadline without dropping some of them, if not, continue on
5) Write down the tasks from (1) to (3) importance ordered by their deadlines
6) Raise the higher importance tasks up the ladder if their deadlines is relatively close to the lower importance ones, taking into account the task duration (the shorter the better)
7) Start working on the tasks by this priority, and redo steps 4 to 6 as you move forward since things may change
Take note that some tasks might be preceding to other tasks. This step by step guide is not full and complex enough for a larger scale of tasks.
Within October I will release a new product to help go through the prioritization and other different tasks, subscribe to the mailing list now to get the info first.
I hope this helped you,
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See you in the next post,
Dekel
