Greg McKeown

Prioritizing tasks at work involves getting all your tasks and commitments in one place.  Take a piece of paper and make a list of everything you need to get done. Questions to help you:

• Do you have commitments to others like your boss, partner, kids, or clients?
• Do you have anything you need to submit? 
• Do you have any financial tasks that need to get done? 
• Do you have any planning that needs to get done? 
• Do you have any administrative tasks? Legal, insurance, staffing, or training?
• Do you have any professional development tasks that need to get done? Training, areas to research, skills to develop, books to read or study, or classes to take?

Find your goals. Without them, it is impossible to prioritize your tasks. Try to set 90-day goals, which is long enough to make meaningful progress. Questions to prompt goals:

• What’s the one thing you could do that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?
• If you were giving advice to someone else in your position, what 1-3 things would you tell them to focus on?
• What do you want to have accomplished over the next five years?

Capture everything on a Master List and then break it down by monthly, weekly, and daily goals.

1. Start by making a master list—a document, app, or piece of paper where every current and future task will be stored. 
2. Once you have all your tasks together, break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
3. When setting your priorities, try not to get too “task oriented” - you want to make sure you’re prioritizing the more effective work.

The matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that answers that helps you separate “urgent” tasks from “important” ones:

• 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.

The Decision Matrix on how to approach tasks has 4 quadrants:

• Quadrant 1: The Urgent Problems which are important.
• Quadrant 2: Not Urgent but important tasks
• Quadrant 3: Urgent but not really important
• Quadrant  4: Distractions and time-wasting tasks. 

Prioritize the important (Quadrant 2) to attain maximum benefit from your work.