Prioritizing tasks – 4 ways easily to prioritize even difficult work.

Learning how to prioritize tasks at work and in your personal life seems simple enough – until you sit down with a list where every single item looks both important and urgent. I think you know that moment when you stare at your list and have no idea where to start.

The way you set your priorities at work (and beyond) affects whether your tasks and projects actually get done, and how engaged your team stays. Proper prioritization is a skill that’s hard to imagine any effective leader, manager, or project lead doing without, regardless of industry.

Setting priorities also helps you manage stress, because when your priorities are in the right order, you focus on the most important tasks instead of spreading your energy across everything at once. That, in turn, boosts your productivity – which I’ll cover in a separate article.

The data on task prioritization

When you look at the literature and articles on task or project management, you might get the impression that everything’s already been said on the topic. So we shouldn’t have any trouble setting priorities, right?

Yet the data is unforgiving and shows that it’s not such a straightforward process after all. Despite being aware of the problem and having a real need to execute tasks according to their priorities, we still:

spend only 40% of our work time on our core tasks / achieving our goals.

On top of that, it turns out we don’t even use that time effectively, because:

a staggering 41% of our tasks never get completed.

What’s more, only 20% of people conduct a time audit to actually check their own productivity. And most importantly:

85% of people admit they don’t know how to set priorities.

Task prioritization – methods that actually work

I’m going to show you a few different ways to prioritize tasks – ones I actually use myself. That’s exactly why I won’t describe the Effort, Impact or Must-haves, Should-haves, Could-haves and Won’t-haves method here. Instead, I’ll focus only on the approaches that will give you immediate relief.

Time management statistics show that 88% of people who don’t set goals fail to achieve results in their work.

Regardless of which method you choose, before you start setting priorities, sit down and think about your deadlines, the resources you have, and the consequences that may follow if you get your priorities wrong – or don’t set them at all.

Remember the Pareto principle too: out of everything you do in a day, only 20% produces 80% of your results.

Structured task prioritization at work

Structured prioritization is an approach for people who like order and full control over what they’re doing. It helps you organize large volumes of complex tasks.

According to one study, 28% of people who use the “I’ll deal with whatever comes up” approach feel their work is never under control.

The method I often use consists of several detailed steps.

List all your tasks

Gather all your tasks into a single list (ideally in the form of a Kanban board). The board can have columns like:

• To review / New – this is where you dump all your tasks
• Urgent
• Important
• Less important
• In progress
• Removed (with a note explaining why, so you don’t forget later)
• Delegated
• Done

Divide tasks into three categories

Split the tasks from the first column into:

• urgent,
• important,
• less important.

Importantly, don’t give in to the temptation of bumping things that have been sitting in the “less important” column for a while up to a higher priority.

Assess the value of tasks in each column

The next step is to assess the value of the tasks in each column in terms of the impact they could have on the organization, goal, project, product, or customer (your pick) – and how much effort you’ll need to put in to get the work done.

Imagine you’re a giant who wants to clear all the rocks scattered across your yard. You’d start with the big ones first. By clearing those first, you might discover there are a few smaller ones hiding underneath that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.

The greater a task’s impact on achieving your goal, the higher value you assign to it – and therefore the higher priority. Then, if some tasks have the same impact and value, sort them by estimated effort and tackle the easiest ones first (you can also do it the other way around, but only when your morale is high).

So you can categorize your tasks as:

• boulders – high-value tasks that require relatively little effort (don’t read too much into the fact that real boulders are heavy – here they’re just a symbol),
• stones – high-value tasks that require significant effort,
• pebbles – low-value tasks that require little effort,
• and grains of sand – low value and high effort.

If a task requires cooperation with others and you currently don’t have team members available to work on a high-priority task, it becomes a lower-priority one.

Do another review

If your list has a lot of tasks, then everything you’ve labeled as sand can either be skipped or simply thrown out.

Delegate what others can do better than you. No matter how tempting it might be to take on every task yourself, delegating part of your workload actually leads to greater efficiency and helps build trust within the team. Just don’t forget to assign a priority to a task before you delegate it. I often see people checking whether a task can be delegated at the very start of their review. I’m not a fan of that approach, because when you delegate without setting the priority first, you rarely come back later to clearly communicate how important that task is from your point of view.

Plan and execute your tasks

Next, we move to planning. Whatever you can, put in your calendar so you block out specific time for working on tasks. Having dedicated space for a task in your day boosts your productivity. In the end, your board might look something like this:

Task prioritization for spreadsheet and math lovers

I found a really nice article a while back about how to make it easier to set task priorities when you’re not sure how to classify them. The author mainly talks about product work, but the methods he proposes can also come in handy in your day-to-day work. They’ll especially appeal to those who still manage their tasks using spreadsheets.

The percentage of organizations using spreadsheets for project management is 67%.

This method makes it very easy to determine the value of each task. It consists of three simple steps where you need to determine:

1. What benefit the task brings to the customer/product. For this, you use a scoring method where X > Y > Z, e.g., X = 30, Y = 20, Z = 10 points.
   • Immediate benefit: X
   • Short-term benefit: Y
   • Long-term benefit: Z
2. What impact not doing the task has on the customer/product. Similarly, A > B > C
   • Immediate impact: A
   • Short-term impact: B
   • Long-term impact: C
3. How much effort the task requires. This is especially important because an organization’s resources are always limited. To characterize the effort, you can use categories P > Q > R:
   • Low: P
   • Medium: Q
   • High: R

After assigning a numeric score to each element, you calculate:

(X|Y|Z) − (A|B|C) + (P|Q|R)

Tasks whose result is closer to 0 should be done first.

It might feel like forced math, but when you’re standing in front of a board with twenty tasks and every one of them seems equally important, a simple formula like this can help more than an hour-long discussion with your team.

Task prioritization using reverse order

This method is very straightforward and incredibly accessible. It lets you prioritize virtually all of your daily activities.

33% of people use a to-do list to manage their tasks and their time.

I’m not sure we should use this approach for highly complex initiatives that could affect an entire organization, but if you keep your tasks on one big list, it’ll definitely help you sort out the order. Here’s how it works:

1. Make two lists. On the first one, write down all your tasks. The second list stays empty.
2. Then look through the first list for an item you know absolutely won’t get done right now or that you can’t tackle yet. Simply one that you know has to wait.
3. Write that item on the second list and cross it off the first.
4. Then repeat steps 2–3 until the first list is completely crossed out.
5. The final step is to execute all tasks from the second list in reverse order.

This is probably the simplest prioritization method I know. It won’t work for quarterly planning, but for a Monday morning when you need to sort through a dozen operational things, it’s surprisingly effective.

Task prioritization with the Eisenhower Matrix

Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States. He served two terms in office from 1953 to 1961. He was a true master of prioritization and productivity, because during his presidency he launched programs related to, among other things:

• the creation of the Internet (DARPA),
• the space race (NASA),
• the air traffic control system,
• and the peaceful use of alternative energy sources.

The President used to say:

“What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

Meanwhile, hard data from reports tells us that:

the average worker spends 51% of every workday on tasks of low or zero value.

To tell urgency apart from importance, Eisenhower created a very simple matrix.

How do you use it? It’s easy.

• Urgent and important? Do it.
• Urgent and not important? Delegate it.
• Not urgent and important? Schedule it.
• Not urgent and not important? Throw it out.

Got a lot of things that are urgent and important? Pick one, do it, then do the next one. That’s the whole philosophy.

Let’s face it – most “urgent matters” that someone drops on your desk turn out to be urgent mainly because someone forgot about them a week ago. The Eisenhower Matrix helps you catch that before you start putting out other people’s fires at the expense of your own priorities.

How to prioritize tasks – a few rules from practice

Regardless of the method you choose, there are a few things that in practice help more than the technique itself.

Don’t prioritize on a Friday afternoon. A tired brain will either want to throw everything out or mark everything as urgent. It’s better to sit down with it in the morning, fresh, ideally at the start of the week. And do it regularly, because the list that was up to date a week ago may look completely different today.

The hardest part is probably accepting that some things just won’t get done. It takes a certain level of self-awareness as a leader to let go without guilt. If nobody’s touched a task for three weeks and the world hasn’t collapsed, that’s information in itself.

And a task that doesn’t have time blocked in the calendar will, in practice, lose to anything that does. I could go on, but I think these few things make the biggest difference.

Task prioritization and productivity

There’s no getting around the fact that task prioritization directly affects your productivity, which in turn affects how well you and your organization perform. As research shows:

Higher employee productivity increases company profits by an average of 21%.

Companies need employees, owners, and managers who deliver a lot of valuable work within a given timeframe. Otherwise, they can’t compete with others, and in the long run they simply lose ground.

People who don’t know how to prioritize their tasks spend an average of 39% of the time they devote to completing them stressing about their workload.

That’s a lot. So I strongly encourage you not to wait and to start organizing the reality around you as soon as possible. None of the methods I’ve described is perfect, but even the simplest prioritization system is better than none at all, because it at least lets you know where to start.

Sources and supplementary materials

https://www.proofhub.com/
https://reclaim.ai/blog/
https://www.lifehack.org/
https://www.zippia.com/advice/time-management-statistics/
https://inside.6q.io/
https://goremotely.net/blog/productivity-statistics/