This tip looks deeper into what Prioritization looks like.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just make a list of the five (or three or one) things we needed to do each day and focus one day at a time? If you’re feeling very overwhelmed, that might be a good place for you to start. For most of us, we need to look ahead to keep our to-do list in a manageable state, so we don’t have to get stressed out jamming 10 hours of work into 4 hours because we didn’t plan for the deadline.
So, we’ll focus today on just on two questions for our brain dump we made yesterday:
1) What are the most important things to get done?
2) When does each thing need to get done?
How do you know what the most important things to get done are?
This is a legitimate question. What makes it important to get done? What will getting it done give you and why is that important? Maybe, as an example, you need to complete a work assignment to get money in order to provide for your family. Connecting something that seems like a chore that we don’t want to do to what it will give us can actually help us find the motivation to want to do it by putting our values and what’s important into perspective.
It can also help us identify things that are on the List of Important Things that really don’t belong there. Maybe we are doing a favor for an acquaintance because we felt bad saying no. But all the favor will do for us is avoid feeling bad for saying no. Maybe the knowledge that saying no will free up more time for what’s important to us can give us the courage to say no and take that item off of the to-do list.
How do you decide when each thing needs to get done?
Is there a hard deadline or is it a perceived deadline? Are there multiple steps involved that should be planned out in order to get the entire task done on time? If the task is really large, can it be broken down into more manageable chunks?
Sometimes we get tasks with tight deadlines at work that don’t allow enough time to actually complete the work. Add that stress and pressure to the energy it takes to perform the task, and you have a much greater challenge. There is a way to manage deadlines at work when you have more to do in a given time than is humanly possible without you either putting on your superhero cape or working a lot of unpaid overtime. Go over your priorities and deadlines with your boss and ask them what should be shifted in terms of priorities, deadlines, or assignments in order to get the work done. A good boss will work with you to shift around priorities, deadlines, assignments, etc. so that everything can get done without you overworking yourself. If you're thinking to yourself that your boss would never talk with you about something like that, that they would expect you to figure it out on your own, that they would be annoyed or irritated by your request for their support, then maybe that tells you that you're not the problem. Maybe it's a cultural issue and it's not your problem to solve. Maybe it's time to start looking for another job. I could help you with that.
Reflect on the decisions you’ve made since starting this series and think about how you can apply what you’ve learned here to decisions going forward. I’ll be back tomorrow with another tip.
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