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How to Prioritize When There's Always More To Do
Things to deprioritize
Intentionally take your focus away from distracting areas in your life.
- Social media and entertainment. While they can add fun to our days, it's worth reducing how much time we spend on apps.
- Busy work. These are tasks we do regularly but that fail to move us forward. These tasks should be delegated, automated, limited, or deleted.
- Negativity. When we focus on the negative, we are prevented from seeing reality clearly. It is then important to be aware of your inner thoughts. Maintain a running record of positive things people say about you.
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Key Ideas
Learning how to prioritize...
...means getting more out of the limited time you have each day. It’s one of the cornerstones of productivity and once you know how to properly prioritize, it can help with everything fro...
Master lists
Capture everything on a Master List and then break it down by monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
- Start by making a master list—a document, app, or piece of paper where every current and future task will be stored.
- Once you have all your tasks together, break them down into monthly, weekly, and daily goals.
- When setting your priorities, try not to get too “task oriented” - you want to make sure you’re prioritizing the more effective work.
Eisenhower Matrix
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.
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Key Ideas
Personal Operations Category
- Task management. This one is most commonly taught and includes systems like Getting Things Done.
- Knowledge management. This is embodied in systems like productivity educa...
What's on your plate
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?
Brainstorm your goals
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?
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Key Ideas
Perfectionism and to-do lists
To-do lists can help perfectionists move past our paralysis. They may find making a list to be a reassuring guide to their day.
But there's also a risk: to-do lists can backfire i...
Break down projects
... into manageable tasks.
This way, you're armed with a set of concrete actions to take rather a vague cloud of high expectations.
Define the next action
... rather than all subsequent steps.
Focusing only on the next action gives you permission to work on something even if you don’t have it all figured out—which is crucial to completing tasks that in the past have left you paralyzed.