If you have ever reviewed the number of tasks and goals you have completed in a day, week, month and a year, you would be astounded by your own capabilities and achievements. But that does not show the complete picture of how productive and efficient you were during that time. Once in a while, you might have missed deadlines or took too much time to complete some tasks. These were serious pitfalls in productivity. How to prioritize tasks at work becomes an important question.
If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.
How to prioritize tasks ?
Most of the time, loss of productivity and inability to meet deadlines is caused by incorrect prioritization of tasks. So, it is crucial to prioritize tasks in order to meet deadlines and
increase productivity. Following are the steps involved in prioritizing tasks better.
10 steps to prioritize tasks
1.Conduct a thorough audit of your tasks and goals
You get a clear picture of your targets and goals for longer time periods, say a year or a quarter, when you complete your performance review. You can break down your goals to fit the lists of tasks during every month, week and day. This helps you create a comprehensive plan of action over a period.
2. Sort the tasks based on urgency, importance and difficulty
The key to prioritizing tasks is striking the right balance between the urgent tasks, difficult tasks and the important ones while planning your day. Urgent tasks have closer deadlines; so they need to be completed soon. Important tasks may need your attention as they could have major implications on your goals and career, but you may have more time to do them. Difficult tasks may need more effort; you have to schedule them during the time when you usually feel more energetic. When you identify and categorize tasks based on these criteria, you can decide which needs to be completed first
3. Mix tasks based on size and difficulty
When you prioritize tasks, make sure you do not take up big and difficult tasks continuously. Mixing up tasks of various sizes and difficulty can help you to stay focused.
4. Complete jobs with same priority, one at a time
When you have multiple jobs with the same amount of urgency and importance, you can analyze the magnitude of impact the tasks will have on your goals and success. You can complete the more impactful tasks first.
5.Group similar tasks
When you continuously work on a task, you get into a rhythm. As a result, if you group similar tasks together, you can stay focused and complete them faster as the effort and process for completing each task is similar.
6.Break down bigger tasks into smaller chunks
When you have bigger tasks that could take even a few days to complete, break them up into smaller milestones and schedule one or two milestones to be completed every day.
7. Put them in a list and add them to the calendar
After you prioritize tasks, create a to-do-list every day and allot an adequate amount of time for every task and milestone. You can schedule tasks and enter them in your calendar
8.Be ready to change your plan on short notice
Some high priority tasks can come up out of nowhere, and you may have to rearrange your tasks and prioritize tasks differently. Develop the flexibility to accommodate new tasks in your schedule on short notice.
9.Outsource tasks and share your workload with others
When you find your schedule full, you can delegate some tasks to others. When you cannot prioritize every task at hand, your ability to do team work comes in handy.
10.Automate with a task management app
Task management apps can automatically prioritize tasks for you and quickly create a work plan with additional inputs from the team.
Prioritizing Better with Profit.co’s Task Management Module
The Profit.co task management module offers teams and individuals the organization and collaborative space they need to keep important work moving forward. This module gives individual employees space to manage their tasks and organize different responsibilities. Additionally, departments and teams can collaborate in designated Workspaces and create customizable Boards for individual functions or projects.
Team members can include all the necessary details for an initiative right on the task itself, including the deadline, priority-level, assignee, and direct links to documents or uploads from Google Drive. Individuals can leave comments directly on the task, so all necessary communication can stay where the work is, and managers can ensure that important tasks are moving forward in order of their priority.
You can try our task management module by getting started with Profit.co today! For more information, visit our product page, or schedule a demo with us.