How can Priority Management be Useful?

Planning your work is important irrespective of your job role – especially if you are running a business. Everyone should know what stones to pick while planning the day, week or month. 

How often has the plan not been fruitful or you had to re-work the plan to suit your constantly changing mind? Having a plan in place dictates how productive you can be and how many tasks you’d be able to tick off your to-do list. Multi-tasking is everyone’s forte in today’s world but you cannot deliver the required results from all the hours of hard work. 

Prioritizing your work becomes important, and hence the concept of Priority Management steps in.

‍What are we talking about?

By definition, Priority Management is a productivity skill that helps you devise a plan to work out strategically on what you should be working on, and when. Establishing a hierarchy of tasks helps you to categorically work on a list of tasks that should be completed first. It also helps you to delegate work, assign responsibilities and mark tasks that can be completed later. The purpose is to highlight and focus on completing the important ones first. It helps in achieving exemplary results.

Why are priority management skills important?

It is about allocating one’s headspace to primitive tasks with long-term impact instead of spending time and effort answering countless emails. Get rid of the routine of ‘dealing with whatever comes up, first’ to manage the day –

The company’s objectives should be transparent and future goals set for the employees to align themselves to the process of achieving milestones and goals. As a manager, let your subordinates have the freedom to set their personal agendas to help increase their productivity and satisfaction.

How to design a priority management structure?

Follow these guidelines to formulate a construct that enables you and your team to reach the epitome of productivity. Highlight the tasks that are to be completed on priority and dedicate the least amount of time delegating accountability and responsibility for the assigned work. 

- Define Your Goals

Map your future goals and the vision for your business. Start by answering a few questions like – What does your business look like in the next 5 years? How do you plan to reach there? Which teams will contribute in achieving the goal? What will be the basic approach to achieving the defined goals? 

One of the industry-approved strategies is SMART which is used to lay out the terms for growth in the next 5 years.

SMART refers to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timed goals. You need to work on the goals in accordance with the teams and provide the team and individual goals. Make points, covering the acronym in defining your team and company goals. 

- Make a Checklist

With a map of goals in place, lay down the roadways to reach there. Have a weekly approach to achieve monthly or long-term goals. It can include easy tasks like answering emails, posting on social media or organizing stints with creatives or analytics to work on a strategy. In other words, add everything that takes up your time, and often tends to be postponed to another day.

Here’s a practice to save the day – be a little predictive and add the tasks that you might have to be dealt with soon – this way, the foreseeable tasks might not seem to be a burden when they arrive.

- Analyze Your Goals & Tasks

Evaluate your tasks in terms of their relevance and the account factor they play in achieving the long-term goal. Analyze the need to prioritize by taking into account the factors like speed, impact enjoyment and effort. Decide the timeline of jobs, and discuss the importance of delegating a job or the need for cross-functional collaboration. ‍

- Build a Map

Work on a blueprint or guideline that helps you work in an organized manner. This map shall remain unchanged through time, it will remind you to prioritize some things over others. You could make a roadmap, flowchart or task list and split it into the different teams that are working to achieve the goal.

- Workout a Master To-Do List

To finally move onto the execution step, make a to-do list to abide by. This should consist of concrete tasks with an end goal, deadlines and dependencies taken into account. You could go the traditional way to make a pen-paper checklist or use the internet gimmicks like the Microsoft To Do or Todoist – wherein you can have a ranking system in place, add notes, access tips and tricks for the team to work better, add progress to ongoing tasks and other things to track the day-to-day progress.

You are just a few clicks away from creating an effective list of meetings for the day, schedule and organize your shifts with Meetly. Add this Google Chrome Extension for an easier, smoother day! 

Get a hang of how To-Do Lists work; Read about The Art of Making To-Do Lists

- Track Your Day-to-Day Work

With your priority management skills in place, you can change the way you work, and manage your time efficiently. You will soon notice that tracking your daily progress snowballs into achieving weekly and monthly goals easily. Along with the master to-do list, work out a daily to-do list to keep your task-time ratio in check. 

End your day by listing down the six most important tasks to be completed the next day. You can also approach your task list from hardest to easiest – picking the hardest task right in the morning.

- Division & Delegation of Work

You cannot do all the work on your own – the sooner you understand this, the better you will be able to divide and delegate work. The agendas should be transparent and shared with all your team members. You need to organize stints with them to understand the prioritization method and to filter out the cold work that can be finished between important tasks. The chrome extension Meetly can help you organize meetings, share agendas, delegate work and also nudge for follow-ups – at all-in-one place.

- Reassessments

Manifesting your master to-do list into your daily tasks shall evolve as you get a better understanding of the workflow. Every now and then, you should allot a time slot to reorganize your work schedule, reassess the map you made and record the progress accordingly. You need to evaluate the work in the process every couple of months. Consider shuffling up the priorities time and again, reviving the energy of your teammates, and analyzing the role of every team in achieving the goal. 

To jot down the key takeaways of priority management, take out time to think and plan your work before diving in. Prioritize your jobs on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to reach the end goal sooner. It helps you to work in an organized manner and meet business targets on time!

Working should not be just about completion but also about how effective and efficient you can be. Refrain from getting stuck under a mountain load of work by exercising a structure to climb up and reach the top with ease.

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