One of the most difficult tasks in companies, is how a team manages to define their #1 priority amidst a huge list of unfinished tasks.
These task lists, in the view of some teams, are all important and necessary to perform “for yesterday”-and thus fail to prioritize some of them.
Prioritizing a task efficiently becomes easier when you learn about it.
In order to help you establish the degree of importance to the tasks you set out to do, we have created this blog post with some strategies for you and your team.
Focus is necessary when everything seems to be important!
Whether you are facing tight deadlines or even several tasks with a good margin of time to complete them, in both you have to be very focused – if you don’t focus, you will quickly lose control.
You will have to concentrate, read over and over again all your tasks and underline the ones that really have to be done first.
Now, we will present you with a set of strategies for the purpose of better understanding what should be crossed out and what logical and priority order they should follow.
Where to start?
1 – The first thing you have to do is breathe. 1, 2, 3 times, as many as necessary. Yes, breathing is one of the strategies that cannot be missed for the following to go as desired. Take a breath and then communicate with your team in a clear, succinct, and proactive way. Here you can find out what styles exist and how you can manage each one at work.
And then what?
2 – Align the company’s teamwork and current projects with the company’s business goals. This is advice given by a freelance writer and business operations expert, Alyssa Towns.
A questão que deve ser feita é: Que objetivo do negócio da empresa que, determinada tarefa, vai ajudar a atingi-lo?
You can, for example, ask your superiors for help and guidance since they are the ones who best understand how your role in the company affects the company’s objectives (short, medium and long term).
Towns already said “If the work is not aligned with one of the current business objectives, it is better to leave it for later.”
3 – Draw up a priority matrix with 4 quadrants: on its left side assign the name “important” and “not important” and at the top of the matrix “urgent” and “not urgent”. The ones you put in the 1st quadrant (urgent and important) are your top priorities and those are the ones you need to put at the top of your to-do list!
Tasks that include “urgent and not important”, on the other hand, should appear as second priority. The ones that you check as non-urgent and important, you can leave them for later as they are not your main focus right now even though you consider them important.
Finally, the non-urgent and non-important tasks you can cross off your list for now, aim them for a later time.
4 – It is not enough to look at the metric: deadline. It is an important criterion, but only with a defined deadline there will be no good prioritization of tasks. Factors such as the duration of a task, the team’s readiness to perform it (confidence), the level of effort the tasks require, and what impact it has on the company’s goals are important to take into consideration when prioritizing.
If after defining the priority tasks for you and your team you don’t feel able to manage them, you can turn to consultants like Task and Flow – through strategic management you will have the necessary support.