How to prioritize your time

No matter what your occupation is, you have to know how to prioritize your time if you want to be successful. This goes for everyone, and it actually extends to your personal life, too.

If this has never been an issue for you, then it means you instinctively know how to do it. And that’s amazing!

However, there are many people who are not sure how to prioritize their time simply because they have never thought about it! They simply do what they’re asked to do, and that is it.

What is prioritization?

First, let’s look at the term “prioritization” itself. What is it? Well, to put it simply, prioritization is determining how important something is to you and then organizing your day around it.

Each of us has different priorities in our personal and professional life. For some, it’s important to check all the tasks in the morning and see how many and when we can complete them. For others, it’s important to jump into the tasks straight away.

Regardless of what your approach is, knowing how to prioritize your time will help immensely.

Why is prioritization important?

When you organize your work day, there are better chances of success. You will feel more productive and have a clear goal for each step of the way. Now, hand in hand with the organization is prioritization. You actually can’t organize yourself without thinking about how to prioritize time.

 

Surely, different people have different approaches, and we will discuss the two main ones.

1. Tackling the biggest task first
2. Tacking less demanding tasks first

Tackling the biggest task first

This is a method often praised by celebrities and those in consulting. For example, Brian Tracy wrote a whole book about it and you can read the summary here.

What he (and many others) advocates is that you need to identify the hardest, most demanding task and work on it first. That’s how they suggest you prioritize time.

There’s also something called the Pareto principle which states that we spend 80% of our time tackling tasks that are worth 20% of our effort. Meaning we spend 80% of our time working on tasks that have only a 20% impact on our lives.

To change it, we need to reassess how we are prioritizing our tasks.

Tackling less demanding tasks first

This is a method I like to call the “warm-up method.” The principle is quite simple: you have a list of tasks that you look at and identify the easy ones. Then, you do those first! This method is great if you need a boost and that extra push to tackle the more serious tasks.

So, for example, in the morning, you tackle 2-5 easy tasks and then when you feel good about yourself, you can tackle the most demanding task. Easy as that!

Conclusion

To conclude, organization and prioritization are very important and they will make your life easier and more productive. How you choose to prioritize time is completely up to you. As long as the work gets done, no one will bug you. However, we do encourage you to try out these two methods and maybe come up with new ones! You need to find out what works best for you.

Needless to say, if you feel like you require additional help and you feel you could benefit from a coaching session, feel free to reach out to us. We offer one-off sessions, as well as full career coaching experience – check our services here. Let’s boost your career together.