How To Manage Your Time By Prioritizing

By Author: Sam Sander
Total Articles: 60
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Being able to establish priorities is the key to getting organised and making the most of your time. But how do you set} priorities for your day-to-day tasks and activities as well as specific action items on your goals and other important jobs in order to make sure you're not letting anything slip through the cracks?

You will always have daily priorities such as taking the kids to school and checking emails, and you should also have daily goal and project specific actions. These all need to be prioritized into one seamless set of action items to make sure your day-to-day life and routine business chores don't take priority over your goals and vice versa.

To prioritize day-to-day activities and goal specific Action Items, try one of the following methods:

1. Must Do Should Do Nice to do

Priority 1: Must Do. These projects or activities} must be completed if you are to consider yourself successful in the long term. These are your highest priority projects or activities.

Priority 2: Should Do. These projects or activities} should be completed, but it is not essential, to consider yourself ...
... successful.

Priority 3: Nice to Do. Everything that's left.

You could also use the terminology high, medium and low priority in the same way..

2. Ranking system

This is where you number all activities in the order that you need to do them, from 1 being most important to however many action items there are on your list. You then work through your list in order.

3. Urgent Important activity matrix

Another popular way of prioritising action items is the Urgent Important activity matrix initially developed by time and organisational management expert Stephen Covey.

This matrix is based on all tasks being assigned a level of urgency and importance, resulting in 4 categories:

A. Urgent and Important activities such as planned meetings
B. Urgent, but not important activities such as answering the phone
C. Not urgent and not important activities such as gossip
D. Not urgent and Important activities such as project planning and research

Human nature means that we instinctively act on activities that are urgent, whether these activities are important or not. That's OK for the activities that are also important, but the other ones are not necessarily the best use of your time and effort.

So this matrix can also be used to explain why taking action on goals sometimes gets into trouble. Goals are typically derived from dreams and desires, which by their very nature are not urgent. Goals are however VERY important and their enabling actions need to be elevated in priority over tasks that are not really important.

So as a tool for helping you prioritise your action items, start by identifying which part of the matrix each task belongs in, and then manage them as follows by prioritizing important activities first. If the other activities really aren't important, it won't matter too much if you don't get to them.

Remember that prioritizing activities is the key to time management and is essential if you have any hope of achieving your goals. Just pick a prioritization system that suits you the best and stick to it.
You can learn more about how to manage your time to achieve all your goals by reading this FREE ebook - "The Time Management Secrets that will Set You Free". You'll also find lots of free tips and tools on a range of self-improvement topics from goal setting to emotional intelligence.