When Everything’s a Priority, Nothing Is

January 31, 2022 Stan

Five steps to prioritize your work and Get Stuff Done while keeping your precious sanity

We know what it’s like. There are a bajillion projects and tasks on your plate, and you have clients, project managers, clients, and your boss all demanding that their specific items have your immediate attention. And of course, those requests are going to change; someone will realize they forgot a key requirement, a deadline will shift, or a new project — due today, of course — will appear out of the ether.

When you have situations like this, saying it can be stressful is an understatement. Having a great project management organization can help, but how does that affect you, the individual, in your day-to-day? Knowing how to prioritize those tasks can help alleviate that stress, as well as ensure that your projects remain on track; I would argue that both are equally important in today’s world.

The following are five steps you can take to help tame the chaos and restore (relative) calm to your day.

Five steps to achieve task prioritization

List out all your pending tasks for the day

If your organization uses a project management software package (Workfront, Jira, Asana, etc.), then you might have this automatically generated for you. If not, open your favorite digital or analog note-taking tool and get to it!

Determine what’s urgent versus what’s important

Once you have your list together, review it and see what’s urgent and what’s important; they’re not the same thing. Something might be classified as “urgent” if it has a due date that’s coming up or is overdue or needs immediate attention for other reasons. Conversely, something might be classified as “important” if it has other tasks depending on it or has a high value to your business. Your definitions may change depending on your workplace of course, so determine what those mean for you.

Once you’ve identified what’s urgent and what’s important — keeping in mind that a task might be both — start putting those tasks into order, starting with the urgent ones, especially those which other tasks might be relying on. Not only does this make sure that you get these done in a timely manner, but it can also help keep other tasks on track (and your colleagues happy). It can also help lift the weight of some of that stress we talked about earlier, especially if you’re faced with a tight turnaround situation. Consider the value of each task as well; what tasks will bring the highest return for the business? Those get moved to the top.

Once the urgent items are prioritized, then continue onto the important ones. If something is both urgent and important, it should go to the top of the list. If you have something that’s neither urgent nor important, then it moves to the bottom of the list. Depending on how many tasks are on your list, it may be worthwhile to see if you can hand off lower-priority items to a colleague who has more available bandwidth.

Look at levels of effort, and order accordingly

Within your urgent/important/other categories, if you still have competing or equivalent priorities, reorder your tasks so that they start with the one that will take the longest to complete, and then continue with decreasing levels of effort as you go. That way, you get the biggest thing out of the way first, which can be a huge boost in the stress relief category; the smaller tasks will seem easier after knocking out the bigger ones, especially as they take less and less time to accomplish.

Roll with the changes

The only constant is change, and that goes triple for projects, and thus, your workload and priorities. But it’s not so bad if you plan for it; just keep it in the back of your mind that something may pop up. Don’t be shocked when that extra project comes out of nowhere, or when the requirements on your project change right before the deadline. Just stay on target and roll with the changes when they happen. And they will.

Be mindful

Finally, it’s important to remember that while you may have a ton of tasks to get done, there’s only so much you can realistically accomplish each day. Once you’ve organized your task list, total up how much time you think each one will take. If there are more tasks than you can reasonably complete, then some of them will need to be moved to the next day.

Once you’ve whittled down your list to what you think you can complete, then it’s time to get underway! If you manage to accomplish everything on the list and still have some time and energy remaining, you can always start to pull in some of those items that were moved. Or you could call it a day and enjoy some well-earned downtime; I won’t judge!

Remember this…

When everything’s a priority, nothing is. That’s why it’s critical to pull the urgent and important stuff out of the noise and understand what your true task priorities are. Not only will it help your projects stay on track and your deadlines met, but it will also help you keep your precious sanity in this crazy world we live and work in.

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