There will always be more items on your to-do list than you can ever complete. You don’t have infinite time or resources. It’s frustrating and stressful, but you just have to admit it’s simply not possible do everything you’d like to in the time you have. Prioritizing is the only solution.
If you don’t consciously set priorities, you let whatever comes up determine how you’ll spend your time. You can work very hard without accomplishing much that’s important. Setting priorities forces you to evaluate each item on your task list and make a conscious, thoughtful decision about what’s the best thing to do. By clarifying your priorities you’ll actually accomplish more in less time. You’ll work smarter instead of harder.
Over the years, experts have devised a number of strategies commonly used to help identify priorities. Here is just one you may want to follow:
- 1. “Covey Quadrants” System
This was created by Stephen Covey, the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It’s based on evaluating the importance of a task versus its urgency. An issue is important if it helps you achieve your goals. It’s urgent if you must do it immediately or you can’t do it at all. Tasks are categorized by being placed in one of four quadrants:
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Q I Important & Urgent
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Q II Important, but Not Urgent |
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Q III Urgent, but not Important
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Q IV Not Important & Not Urgent |
Items in QI are tasks are very important to achieving your goals and have a deadline that must be met immediately.
QII tasks are also projects that are important to achieving goals; however, deadlines and consequences aren’t breathing down your neck this minute. This remoteness can make it easy to put these tasks off; so it’s important to keep them moving or urgent problems may arise and shift them into Q1.
The items in QIII and IV are the day-to-day busy work that can consume great amounts of time if you’re not paying attention. When some things aren’t going to get done because your workload exceeds the hours in the day, these are the things to let drop.
The tasks in Quadrants I and II are the ones you should spend most of your time on.
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