Chapter 17: Prioritization
Amy Baldwin
Questions to Consider:
- Why is prioritization important?
- What are the steps involved in prioritization?
- How do I deal with situations where others’ priorities are not the same as my own?
- What do I do when priorities conflict?
- What are the best ways to make sure I complete tasks?
Another key component in time management is that of prioritization. Prioritization can be thought of as ordering tasks and allotting time for them based on their identified needs or value.
This next section provides some insight into not only helping prioritize tasks and actions based on need and value, but also how to better understand the factors that contribute to prioritization.
How to Prioritize
The enemy of good prioritization is panic, or at least making decisions based on strictly emotional reactions. It can be all too easy to immediately respond to a problem as soon as it pops up without thinking of the consequences of your reaction and how it might impact other priorities. It is very natural for us to want to remove a stressful situation as soon as we can. We want the adverse emotions out of the way as quickly as possible. But when it comes to juggling multiple problems or tasks to complete, prioritizing them first may mean the difference between completing everything satisfactorily and completing nothing at all.
Make Certain You Understand the Requirements of Each Task
One of the best ways to make good decisions about the prioritization of tasks is to understand the requirements of each. If you have multiple assignments to complete and you assume one of those assignments will only take an hour, you may decide to put it off until the others are finished. Your assumption could be disastrous if you find, once you begin the assignment, that there are several extra components that you did not account for and the time to complete will be four times as long as you estimated. Or, one of the assignments may be dependent on the results of another—like participating in a study and then writing a report on the results. If you are not aware that one assignment depends upon the completion of the other before you begin, you could inadvertently do the assignments out of order and have to start over. Because of situations like this, it is critically important to understand exactly what needs to be done to complete a task before you determine its priority.
Make Decisions on Importance, Impact on Other Priorities, and Urgency
After you are aware of the requirements for each task, you can then decide your priorities based on the importance of the task and what things need to be finished in which order.
To summarize: the key components to prioritization are making certain you understand each task and making decisions based on importance, impact, and urgency.
ACTIVITY 17.1
To better see how things may need to be prioritized, some people make a list of the tasks they need to complete and then arrange them in a quadrant map based on impo