With the looming pressures of both work and life responsibilities, it’s easy to freeze up all to-dos. Your to-do list becomes an unstructured mess when you’ve got no idea as to how to prioritize tasks. This is one of the biggest challenges for project managers, teams, and leaders. You’ll likely have a lot of things to work on. And probably it’s difficult to focus on just one task, whether it’s for your business, your customer experience, or simply to carve out more personal and family time.
Prioritization is simply related to getting more out of the limited time that you’ve got each day. It can help you with everything from productivity to time management to work-life balance.
85% of American’s admit they don’t know how to prioritize as well as they would like to. How about you? Here come the head-scratching questions: How to prioritize all of those to-dos in a meaningful way? When you feel like everything is important, you end up spreading yourself so thin that nothing gets done properly.
Can you prioritize your to-dos? Definitely. Sign up now on ProofHub to do it the way you want.
Keeping your workload under control (Workload prioritization) is important for any business. Project managers and teams are often stuck between managing their team’s workload and managing their own. This is why it’s so important to consider how you’re prioritizing and organizing your workload.
In this article, you’ll learn about how do you organize your workload and plan your work (and not go crazy)?
Table of Contents
Here’s how to prioritize work effectively (Workload prioritization tips)
Know Exactly What Your Work Is
Start with the first step – know what actually your work is. Make a list of things along with any deadlines you have. When you do this, you’ll know what is important and what is not. Also, you’ll be justified for your work.
Business guru Stephen Covey once said:
“When people are clear about the most important priorities of the business, they can prioritize their work around those top priorities to be more productive, and discover to have the time they need to have a whole life.”
Once you know what you want to do, you’ll be able to divide your work into; one day task, recurring tasks, and projects.
Assess Which Tasks Are Important, Urgent, or Both
What does the term important and urgent exactly mean? Let’s start by defining these terms:
- Important means “marked by significant worth or consequence.”
- Urgent means “calling for immediate attention.”
These are quite simple terms but a number of people have had trouble dividing their tasks according to their importance and urgency because sometimes it feels like every task is urgent. The Eisenhower Method of Prioritization is a matrix-based solution to this common issue. How does it work? You can easily prioritize your tasks from one project you’re working on and put into the four quadrants:
- Critical and Urgent (Do it now)
- Critical and Not Urgent (Decide: schedule a time to do it)
- Not Critical, but Urgent (Delegate: who can do it)
- Not Critical, nor Urgent (Delete it)
The end goal of this principle is to help you in decision-making, filter the noise, and concentrate on what really matters to you.
Create Your To-Do List
Creating a to-do list sounds like the most basic of all bits of advice. Put your skills to work to prioritize tasks by always getting to work from the list by your side. Whatever you have on your plate, put it on the list before you plan to do it. Every part of the project that you haven’t accomplished should be on your to-do list. You can increase your productivity and output by 25% when you begin working consistently from a list. When you make out your to-do list the evening or the night before, your subconscqious mind works on the list all night long while you sleep.
How To Prioritize the Things on Your To-Do List?
- Break down your list based on the due dates and the duration of your tasks
- Minimize unproductive to-do items from your daily list
- Extremely rewarding things to be on the top of your list
- Schedule your work on workload management tools
Consistent Communication
Prepare and communicate priorities and timelines because even a small misunderstanding can cause stress, frustration, and even anger. From the start to the end of a project, clear communication can help avoid troubling emotions altogether. For each project, establish a communication process. Make regular check-ins to make sure everyone is moving in the right direction
Ask your team members regularly to share how they’re feeling, what’s pulling them down, and what’s challenging them. Keep your team informed in every phase.
Takeaways:
- Try a communication and collaboration tool for effective one-on-one chat and group chat
- Build a communication process to respond to your team’s feedback
- Check in with your team regularly
ProofHub is a great tool to sort out your project priorities. Here’s how!
Time Management Tools
An effective time planner and a master list can help you achieve any goal you set your mind to. When you wake up with great ideas and insights, you can prioritize tasks to get your job done faster and better. You need a lot of time to make written lists of everything you have. Using a time management tool, you can make a schedule to practice maximum productivity and good personal organization. No matter what you are up to there are digital time management systems to get tap into your to-do list to help organize every part of your life.
Set the Tone of The Day by “Eating The Frog”
In the words of Mark Twain, if you eat a live frog each day for breakfast, nothing worse can happen for the rest of the day. So the idea is to eat the worst frog as early as possible then breeze through the day. Once you prioritize your tasks, choose how to tackle the day. Because how you start the day will set the tone for the rest of your day.
Take back control of your workday. ProofHub lets you spend your time so you can stay focused on what matters. Sign up here.
Use a Project Management or Task Management Software that ALLOWS YOU TO PRIORITIZE
ProofHub is a work management solution that not only allows you to manage your projects and tasks for each project but also to PRIORITIZE tasks to make sure your tasks are done at the right time.
With the tool, you can communicate to everyone which tasks are critical and which are not. Some other features that project managers and teams love in ProofHub are:
- Request forms: Customizable request forms to manage your requests for work, avoid cluttered inbox, and never miss a requirement.
- Discussions: Bring all your clients and team discussions at one place where you can add comments, mention people, and add files and documents.
- Gantt charts: Timeline view to plan projects, modify schedules, and visualize tasks.
- Calendar: Organize your events, tasks, and milestones all at one place.
- Project reports: Online reporting tool with detailed project reports to help analyze project progress at one place.
- Announcements: Convey information that may not be project-specific, related to events, birthday announcements, or any such.
- ProofHub Chat: Quick one-on-one and group conversations with teams and clients, attach files and use emojis.
- Proofing: Collaborate on marketing designs and documents to review, proof, and annotate files with markup tools.
- Time tracking: Set time estimates, add timesheets, track time manually or using timers, add multiple timers, export timesheets at one central place.
- File management system: Upload, store, and organize files in one place.
- And much more!
Schedule, discuss, prioritize, and track work on ProofHub. Sign up now.
