How to ruthlessly prioritize tasks to get more done
Parent Post
Checking items off your
Checking items off your to-do list is always easier said than done. The best way to complete your tasks is through ruthless prioritization.
It also means deciding what’s the most important task even when everything on your list feels crucial.
Here are some tips and techniques to help prioritize your tasks.
Use relative prioritizationCategorizing your
Use relative prioritization
Categorizing your tasks using a priority matrix helps, but what if you still have dozens of tasks in your urgent and important queue?
Assign each task a priority number. If you have ten tasks, each task gets a number 1-10. The exercise here is to weigh each task against the others in order to determine where to start first.
To-do list apps and Kanban apps that allow for drag-and-drop prioritization can be really helpful when using the relative prioritization technique.
A good rule of
A good rule of thumb when planning your day is to underestimate how much you can get done and overestimate how long each task will take.
Time-blocking apps like Plan are great for this exercise because they let you create a master to-do list and then drag and drop to-dos onto your calendar to schedule them into your day.
Pick a single thing
Pick a single thing to focus on
Pick a single thing off the task list to focus on that day.
Choosing a single task or idea to focus on can be a good way to remind yourself to stay on track whenever you find yourself getting distracted.
A Chrome extension like Momentum is great for this method because it shows you what your focus is for the day each time you open a new browser tab.
If you don’t want
If you don’t want to forget a task you’re deleting, move it to a separate “someday” list of things you want to do if you ever find yourself with time but nothing to fill it with.
Once you’re finished doing, delegating, and deleting tasks, what you have left are your deferred tasks. These are all things you need to do that will take longer than two minutes to complete.
With a master list of your deferred tasks in hand, you’re ready to start prioritizing.
Find your 20% taskThe
Find your 20% task
The Pareto principle states: You tend to get 80% of your results from 20% of your work.
Make that 20% work your priority—and your benchmark for a productive day. The best way to identify your 20% work is this simple exercise:
First, ask yourself what you’d work on if you could only do three things today. Be ruthless; only pick three.
Next, cut that down to two.
And finally, just one. If you absolutely had to stop working after doing only one task, which would you do?
There are plenty of
There are plenty of ways to prioritize tasks, and some may work better for you than others.
Use a priority matrix
Once you’ve laid out your tasks, aim to get through the urgent and important tasks first so you’re not butting up against deadlines.
Then focus on the most productive quadrant: not urgent and important.
Make a prioritized task
Make a prioritized task list for today
If you have to manage a lot of incoming to-dos, make a prioritized task list each morning for the things you plan to do that day.
Look at your calendar and see how much time you think you’ll have to devote to items on your task list today.
Next, pick however many of the highest-priority tasks on your list that you think you can get through today.
Consolidate all of your
Consolidate all of your tasks into a single source
In order to prioritize your task list efficiently, create a master to-do list that contains all of the tasks you need to prioritize and complete from all of those sources.
Pick a place for your master to-do list. That place could be a to-do list app, your email inbox, Slack, a paper notebook, or even a memo app on your phone.
It doesn’t matter where you keep your list as long as it contains all of the tasks you need to complete.
Analyze your task listNow
Analyze your task list
Now it’s time to go through your list, review each task, and decide what you want to do with it. You have four options:
- Do: complete the task now
- Defer: complete it later
- Delegate: assign it to someone else
- Delete: remove it from your list
Focus on your Most
Focus on your Most Important Tasks (MITs)
Choose a few (usually three) tasks to get done each day; those become your MITs.
When using MITs, your to-do list would have 1-3 of these, and anything else listed would become a bonus.
You only work on bonus tasks if all your MITs are done.