Priorities: Setting and Ranking Them

When you are hard at work, virtually everything you touch seems important. Nonetheless, setting and ranking priorities will help keep everything in its proper perspective. This is a positive and proactive way of getting things done more effectively and more efficiently.

Time and Work

Setting and ranking priorities means acknowledging that some tasks require more time and work than others. If you make the mistake of trying to allot equal amounts of time to every single task you must complete, it will slow you down and you will not accomplish as much as you would like.

While it is true that you want to give your best to every task that you perform, determining which ones will require the most time and effort is a much more productive approach than trying to look at everything equally.

Order

Setting and ranking your priorities also means that you must determine which tasks need to be completed first. You are probably thinking, well that’s only logical. Well, Mr. Spock, it may be logical, but it does not always happen that way for most of us.

Let us suppose that there is a large project, further out on the horizon, which will require a significantly larger amount of your time and effort than the smaller projects you have immediately at hand. Perhaps there is one project which includes an important time frame, or even a firm deadline. In instances like these you may find that you are tempted to do the smaller, quicker and easier tasks first. Although this approach does mean that these easier tasks will be completed and off your to-do list, the one which you should have given your attention to first, may not.

When you rank your priorities, you can begin by deciding which job or project needs to have your full attention before any of the others. This method ensures that the “main thing” gets don. But, it also that you can meet this obligation with enough motivation and enough physical and psychological energy to get it done correctly, to the best of your ability, efficiently and effectively. The sooner you begin tasks with deadlines, the more likely you will be to complete them on time.

Our best for the important and impactful projects

Setting and ranking your priorities is neither a difficult nor a time consuming venture. If we can begin each work day with a brief outline of everything we need to accomplish, we can then assign top priority to the tasks which must be completed first. This will help to make the entire work day move more smoothly, and you will get more done.

Yes, we want to give our very best to all of our projects. But, we also want to be careful to give our best and fullest energy and best time management to the projects that have the most impact on our personal and professional lives.

Begin to prioritize your tasks properly and your stress level will shift.