Dear daughter, by now you what are the benefits of prioritizing. Today I want to show you how to prioritize.
If you don’t remember what are the benefits of prioritizing, you can read them again by clicking on this link.
I used to start my day by doing the things I love the most. Big mistake!
As I started writing down my goals and checking the advances I made every week, I realized that I was wasting a lot of time. In other words, I was taking more time than I should be taking to achieve certain goals.
Guess what was the problem? You are right, I was not prioritizing at all.
Once I started doing first the most important tasks, everything turned around better.
I started to see the benefits of prioritizing in my daily life. Some of these benefits are:
- Avoid procrastination.
- Avoid feeling overwhelmed.
- Save time.
- Be more productive.
- Make better decisions.
- Reduce stress.
- Achieve your goals.
- Become a better you.
In this post, I’ll show you how to do it.
Table of Contents
Techniques to prioritize
Let me start with some techniques that you can follow to prioritize. I use them myself and they proved to give great results.
The Eisenhower matrix
This method is about creating a 2×2 matrix as in the figure below.
As you can see in the picture, you need to have two columns: Urgent and Not Urgent; and two rows: Important and Not Important.
The idea is to put all your tasks in the matrix according to how you classify them.
So, write down a list of all your tasks in a paper.
Get some sticky notes and write each task in one sticky note.
Now, let’s put each note in the right place.
Get the first note, and ask yourself, is this task important? Is it urgent? If the two answers are “yes”, then you put the note in the first quadrant.
If the task is not important, but urgent, put it in the corresponding quadrant (not important & urgent).
Repeat the process for every task until you have all your tasks on the board.
The first time you do this, you will find out that most of your tasks are in the Urgent column, divided between Important and Not Important.
This is what keeps you busy (which usually is the opposite of productive), most of your tasks are urgent, so you cannot strategically decide what you should be doing, because you have a lot of “Urgent” things to do.
Once your matrix is full of your tasks, you prioritize by doing first the things that are urgent and important. The things that are not important you can delegate to someone else so you can free your time for the things that really matter to you.
When I followed this technique, I realized that I did not have a long-term plan, or at least, I couldn’t work on my long-term plan.
As I started working using the matrix, something interesting happened, the Urgent column is empty most of the time.
I created an inexpensive board using Styrofoam. See below what my matrix looks like.
The tasks that keep me busy most of the time are in the quadrant Important and Not Urgent. This gives me time to plan, strategize, find out the best approach, to be busy on what really matters and what will give me the best results.
This is a great place to start when you start prioritizing.
In the beginning, you will find yourself trying to procrastinate on these urgent and important tasks.
Something that helped me overcome this challenge, is the book Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy. In this link is a summary (that I created for you) of that book.
The author compares working on unwanted tasks to eating a frog. He states, and I agree with him, that if you eat a frog first thing in the morning, the rest of the day is better, as you already did the worst task you had for the day. So, for the rest of the day, you will do more pleasant things, therefore you will feel better and better as time passes.
The ABCDE method
“The ABCDE method grades your tasks, starting with A (very important) and ending with E (the least important). To implement this method, you need to take the task list you have created, assign a letter to each task based on its level of importance, and tackle tasks accordingly.” Source.
As you can see, this method is straightforward. Assign a priority to each task according to the level of importance and execute them in that order.
One way of doing this without breaking your neurons is to write down all the tasks on paper. When you have all your tasks, assign a priority to each task using a letter from A to E. Then get another paper, or an app, and write the tasks according to the priority.
Now, you follow the order to execute the tasks.
If you write your notes on paper, make sure that you have that paper with you at all times. In this way, when you finish a task, you don’t need to think about what to do next. You just take out your list, tick off the task you executed, and move to the next one, without having to think about what to do next.
Remember that 1 minute of planning can save you 10 minutes in execution?
This is one of the advantages of this method, it saves you time every day.
You can combine this method with the previous one. You can use your matrix to clear your urgent tasks. After that, you create your strategic tasks.
Then, you plan what you need to do to carry out your strategic tasks using the ABCDE method.
This will give you awesome results. So, don’t wait, start now!
The Pareto principle
The Pareto principle, or the 80/20 principle, states that 20% of what you do, gives you 80% of the results you achieve.
This is a well-known fact and several research has been published about it.
To apply this principle, you only need to think about what drives most of the results you have, identify that 20%, and do more of that 20% (the important things) and less of the other 80% (the less or no important things).
The 80% of what you do you can delegate to someone or pay someone else to do it.
You can think about it this way, if while doing 20% of your tasks you earn 200 $ per hour, and doing the other 80 % you earn 50 $ per hour (as it drives only 20% of your results), wouldn’t be better to pay 50 $ to someone, so you can spend more time earning 200 $ per hour? You bet is better!
There are other techniques, but I want to suggest only the ones I applied and gave me great results.
Tips to prioritize your tasks
After showing you the techniques I use, I want to give you some tips that will keep you on track and will help you to succeed in your prioritizing process.
Here are some of the tips I have for you:
- Identify and write down your goals. Yes, my daughter, you actually need to have goals to prioritize effectively. You need to know what you want to achieve for you to actually achieve it. Once you have clarity on what you want to achieve, you will clearly see what is important to you. Therefore you can prioritize the important things.
- Consider the urgency and importance of each task. You can ask yourself what the impact on your goals will be if you decide to postpone this specific task. As Brian Tracy says, if you have to leave town today and don’t come back in three months, what is the one task you know you must execute before you leave? Urgency refers to how soon the task needs to be done, while importance refers to how much impact the task will have on your goals.
- Use a prioritization matrix. The matrix is great because is a visual tool that can help you to see and compare the urgency and importance of different tasks.
- Set deadlines for yourself. Deadlines can help you to stay on track and to avoid procrastination. For each task, you should allocate a certain amount of time. This will help you to focus, so you can finish on time. Don’t leave a task with an open time, as this will influence you to procrastinate, as you have more time to do it.
- Be flexible. You need to be flexible because your priorities today might be the same tomorrow. Review your priorities regularly. If something new comes up, that you see is more important for you, or can help you to achieve your goals faster, update your priorities and time allocation in writing, and follow through. Sometimes things don’t go according to plan, so be prepared to make adjustments as needed.
- Be realistic. Even though is good to think big, overshooting can give you stress and make you procrastinate. Do one thing at a time and celebrate the small achievements. With time, the small achievements will compound into great achievements.
- Be patient. Roma was not built in one day.
Summary
Prioritizing is an important topic in our lives, at least if we want to be successful in whatever we do.
It has many benefits, the main ones for me are that can help me achieve my goals and have the type of life I want to have.
The three techniques I use to prioritize are the Eisenhower Matrix, the ABCDE method, and the 80/20 principle.
While building your career, wealth, and future, be patient, flexible, and consistent. These will benefit you in the long run and will help you build the future that you want for yourself.
And for sure, goals are a must in our life for us to move forward, so write down yours if still didn’t do it.
So, what prioritizing technique are you going to use first?
Love you, Dad.