Finding ways to effectively prioritize your work especially the large and complex ones will help you create an order, that will simplify your daily living. If you will know how to prioritize your work it will bring more success to your business. It will also bring more engagement to your team and consolidate your role as a team leader.
One of the greatest challenges of prioritizing work by leaders is how to break down tasks on daily basis. Yes, you need to be diligent especially through a lot of practice, but this is how you will get things done. In order to deal with your workload more effectively, there are 6 critical steps in task prioritization, these are;
- Collection of all tasks that needs to be handled,
- Identifying urgent and Important tasks,
- Assessment of value,
- Ordering tasks by the estimation of efforts involved,
- Becoming adaptable to task prioritization of tasks,
- Knowing when to cut tasks down.
Collection of all tasks that needs to be handled
Having a list of the tasks to be handled is the first step you must take in handling your priorities. You need to pull everything together, especially those you consider to be needed in completing for the day, and at this stage you don’t need to be worried about the order of prioritizing yet, you just have to know everything beforehand.
Identifying urgent and Important tasks
Once you have a complete lists of what is needed to be done for the day, it is now time for you to start identifying those that need urgent attention from those that are important. The urgent tasks which need to be prioritized are the ones, that if not be completed by the short period of time, may attract dozen negative consequences, in workplace. Some of the most urgent tasks you may have to handle within the shortest possible time, include the missed client deadline, and missed publications. You need to prioritize those Activities that have high dependency on time, before any other task is prioritized.
Assessment of value
If there are no tasks that require urgent attention and you are searching for how to prioritize tasks, then you may have to consider the values of each component of your tasks. Consider those important works and identify those that carry more value on your organization or businesses. The general practice here is to identify and recognize the tasks that possess top priority ahead of others. To maximize the benefits in this step, you must identify client works ahead of organization’s internal tasks, or executing all customer support tickets before you update a software. Generally, the more the impact of a task on people’s lives, the higher the value created.
Ordering tasks by the estimation of efforts involved
Sometimes, the best work prioritization process, is the evaluation of the amount of efforts, in terms of energy , time and resources they require for completion. This step is necessary when you have many tasks that seem to tie, in terms of priority, and value. Simply check on the estimates of the projects and then prioritize the ones you think, will take most efforts to handle and completed. In this situation, you may want to consider handling the lengthier tasks first, before you consider the shorter ones. You should be motivated enough to handle the lengthier and more difficult tasks ahead of smaller ones in order to reduce the time to complete all the tasks.
Becoming adaptable to task prioritization of tasks
When searching for the solution on how to prioritize projects, you must consider the uncertainties and change that may occur to your priorities. You can change priorities at any time, therefore your workload prioritization must be adaptable to new challenges. Priorities also can change when you expect them at least. Well, the main trick here is that you have first of all complete the tasks that you are presently committee to before you switch to another. Being adaptive and flexible does not mean you have to abandon a task that is currently being handled, but you need to be adaptive and flexible when you are not fully committed to certain groups of tasks – you can leave them and go to the ones that need urgent attention first.
Knowing when to cut tasks down
Sometimes, one of the best ways to prioritize tasks is to break them down into simpler and smaller units. Prioritizing at work becomes necessary when you find it difficult to get down with everything on your lists – you just need to prioritize your tasks first and then consider your estimates, and then remove the remaining challenges from your lists if there are no sufficient time to handle them. You need to focus first on those tasks that are compulsory, and can be handled for the whole day. After that try to complete the rest in the list. If you are looking or how to prioritize workloads, without missing out on anything, these 6 steps should guide you through. They are proven task prioritization methods that have been found to be highly effective, and do not compromise on your standards. If you are looking for how to prioritize work with the use of an effective app, then you should consider Workly. This app can help you prioritize your work by handling many administrative and other duties for you. It simplifies the process of breaking down tasks and creating workloads. The app can help in breaking down tasks into simpler units and then create a time frame for individual team members to handle the task. As a leader of a team in an organization, you can rely on this app to simplify most of the complex management decisions you need to take, especially on tasks that need urgent attention and those that need to be handled based on deadlines.