The Simple Dos and Don’ts of Prioritization
In my last blog I wrote about the importance of prioritizing to help you maximize your time. We prioritize all day, every day without even knowing it. In business, more often than not, we’re asked to prioritize our work, our people, our spend…you name it. In my advisory work, I often help organizations and teams create their quarterly or yearly priorities. There are simple tricks to use and hang ups to avoid to help in the process whether you’re prioritizing professionally or personally.
Prioritization Dos
Tie your priorities to your goals – always ask yourself if your individual priority is helping you achieve one of your desired goals or objectives. If it doesn’t, it may still be a valid priority but it shouldn’t rank highly on your list.
Choose your levers – understand what you’re using to judge your priorities – is it time, money, resources, brand integrity, competition? Tuning in to these factors is integral to sorting through and ranking your work.
Categorize your tasks – it’s always helpful to see if you’re prioritizing across a diverse set of To Dos or a or within a set that’s similar. For example, if you’re ranking a group of projects that need to be completed in order of priority it’s useful to prioritize them relative to one another, especially when you have finite resources as a lever.
Prioritization Don’ts
Overcomplicate your methodology – sometimes prioritization comes down to gut feel, sometimes you need a weighted matrix to score your priorities and rank them. Whichever route you take, keep it simple and easy to articulate or defend.
Get stuck – don’t get hung up prioritizing and re-prioritizing until you get your list absolutely perfect. The point is to give yourself, or your team, a guide for action and doing.
Make it all top priority – this almost goes without saying, but not everything can be number one on the list. If you believe in your prioritization methodology, trust the outcome.
Need help building your prioritization methodology or want to talk about how you prioritize? Contact me!