Urgent and important. Important but, not urgent. Everyone has multiple demands on their lives. Whether it is at work or at home it frequently seems as if everyone wants a piece of you now, right now. But, of course
, it is not possible to be everything for everyone at the same time and it is also impossible to do it all at once.
At work the skill of prioritization needs to be developed into an art form in order to be successful. Your boss needs a report, a customer is waiting on an offer and a deadline is looming for some information you need to provide to legal for some litigation they are pursuing. Sounds familiar?
You are not alone, but how you handle this and similar challenges has a huge impact on your professional success.
Why does it have such a big impact? You guessed it! Getting the answer to the “what to do first” question right is not easy, and because each situation is unique there is no blueprint that you can use that will accommodate all such situations you will ever come across.
But, there are some best practices you can use and, if you follow these guidelines they will help you make the right decision more often than not and you will get better at making the least damaging tradeoffs between what gets done now and what just needs to wait.
1. Keep a Plan
This is a simple but important step. Have a calendar, agenda, document of some sort in which you track everything that you know you have to do the dates they are needed and how long they take you to do them. As new things pop up – add them.
The plan will allow you, at a glance to see what needs to be done and, together with the next two steps, quickly identify and resolve any potential conflicts.
2. Understand
It is key to have a thorough understanding of what you need do. This includes knowing what is involved, who is affected and what the impact is on the Company of getting the work done (or not getting it done).
Things to ask yourself:
• Does the work have a direct customer, company valuation or profit impact?
• By not delivering, are you preventing someone else from doing their work – does that impact customers or profit?
• Is this a five-minute job or a week-long task – do you know? If not, find out.
3. Communicate
Often the situation is that there is a boss or a colleague asking you for something for right now. But, your plate is full and you cannot do everything at once so, you might decide to drop something else important just so you can deliver on this “really urgent item”. When the something else that was on your plate gets dropped or delayed, that same person who asked you to do this other rather “urgent” task is surprised and might even say: “I didn’t mean for you to drop that…that is more important, this could have waited a few days, really…”.
Know that, for the most part, no one really knows or cares what you have to do (not even your manager) they just expect you to do it. So, if after you have looked at your plan and have understood what needs to be done and then, you still see a conflict – that you really will not manage to do what needs to be done t – communicate. Communicate to your boss, your colleagues, even your customer if you need to. And do not be afraid to ask for help when you need it.