Well hello there and Happy Friday! As you may have noticed… I haven’t posted anything yet this week! That’s mainly because I found myself struggling to keep up with everything, so I decided to take a little break and organize, prioritize and plan everything I need to do for the next couple of months.
Now I know on Friday the last thing on your mind is to set up your goals and to-dos… but honestly I’ve found this is the best time to do it.
Your mind isn’t focused on what all you have to do that week. You’re in a good mood and excited for the weekend. And once you write everything down and organize it, you can relax during the weekend knowing you have a plan.
So here’s my approach at prioritizing and organizing my endless to-do list.
STEP 1: BRAIN DUMP
First, write everything down: Personal and work tasks should be captured in one place.
If you have long-term goals, break them down into yearly, monthly, and weekly achievements. This is your Master List.
Your Master List helps you understand how to prioritize all your tasks. But it can still get complicated when deciding what needs to get done now versus later. There are a few prioritization techniques I use that might help you separate the urgent from the important tasks.
STEP 2: PRIORITIZE
Employ the urgent-versus-important method: Prioritize urgent and important tasks; set a specific time to work on important non urgent tasks; and delegate or remove all other tasks.
In this case, you can use the Eisenhower Matrix.
In basic terms, urgent tasks are things you feel like you need to react to right away, like emails, phone calls, texts, or news. While important tasks are ones that contribute to your long-term mission, values, and goals.
When looking at how to prioritize tasks best, ask which one of the quadrants they best fit in:
Urgent and Important: Do these tasks as soon as possible
Important, but not urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and schedule it
Urgent, but not important: Delegate these tasks to someone else
Neither urgent nor important: Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible
STEP 3: DAILY TASKS
Create a daily MIT list: Write down three Most Important Tasks that should be done that day. These tasks should always relate to your larger, future goals. Nothing else matters here. This is your primary focus for the day.
Then, determine three medium priorities. Ideally, these should be subtasks related to your main priority. And, schedule no more than five small must-to-do- priorities, such as meetings, general chores etc. While these are important and deserve your time, these are smaller to-dos since they don’t require as much energy.
STEP 4: DEADLINES!
Create clear deadlines: Give yourself full visibility of deadlines, even when something doesn’t necessarily need a deadline, make one. It could be a year from now, as long as there is a date attached (which you can always change) so you don’t just forget about it or put it off forever.
As a side note, I use Asana, a great free website and app to organize everything from laundry to client work that needs done.
A few more small tips that are necessary to remember!
Avoid distractions: Intentionally steer clear of competing tasks, especially as task difficulty increases.
Consider effort: When your task list is becoming too much, prioritize according to effort and breeze through those easier tasks more quickly.
Be flexible and adaptable: Uncertainty and change are given. Know that your priorities will change, and often when you least expect them to. So plan for the unexpected.
Know when to cut: Be realistic. You probably can’t get to everything on your list. After you prioritize your tasks and look at your estimates, cut the remaining tasks from your list, and focus on the priorities that you know you must and can complete for the day.
Then take a deep breath, dive in, and be ready for anything.