Skip to main content

Prioritizing: 5 Ways to Think About Tasks

One of the most challenging things in life is prioritizing. I find this is true for me particularly during the holidays and during the summer. There are so many things to do and see and just not enough time to do them. This is slightly different from time management in that time management is really the art of taking the time that you have allocated for a particular task or set of tasks and using techniques to ensure that this time is used for the tasks that you have decided on accomplishing.

For me, the problem isn't so much with time management. I've gotten better at that recently and I know how my body and mind work so I can handle that much of the time. Instead, the problem is more upstream -- prioritizing. I enjoy doing many different things throughout the day. I don't have ADD or ADHD or anything like that, but I really like switching gears often. I notice a significant reduction in my productivity if I have to do the same thing for more than 2-3 hours straight. I instead prefer to have 'organized chaos' with lots of little things going on all at the same time.

Rarely, I do find the need to focus - but this is rare. Most of the stuff I work on either in my job or at home is not too taxing and therefore doesn't require significant concentrated effort. But without further ado, here are my 5 tips for prioritizing quickly and easily:

-- Time: How much time is the task going to take? If it is a short task (less than 15 minutes, do it immediately. If you put it off, you will likely spend more time procrastinating than if you just did it.

-- Deadline: If there is a deadline to the task, particularly a monitary deadline, get it out of the way. In order to be certain that there is enough breathing room for these kinds of tasks, try to get these done a week ahead of time. Its not always possible, but if you get in this habit, you will notice that you are always ahead and therefore there is much less stress.

-- Iterations?: If this is a task that will require many meetings, (going back to the river, as it were), you need to determine your team or other people. If the people or person you're working with is notoriously late or changes his/her mind frequently, it is likely that you will want to put this on the back burner. On the other hand, if the task is something that will reduce work later on and will likely reduce overall iterations, then get it done soon.

-- Importance: Often times, things are very important, but they have no deadline or person clamoring for them. So, they get pushed off. Wills, Trusts, estate planning and retirement are the ones that spring to my mind. People think there's plenty of time and the only person getting hurt is them so they don't care. When something is important, you need to do it quickly. Sometimes, you might have to be late on other items if it is the only way to get to these things. Don't short change yourself or people you care about on items that are critical.

-- Flexibility: Are the requirements/deadlines/time constraints set in stone? If not, consider which tasks you might be able to push back on. It is often an 80-20 situation. If I can find that by pushing back on 1 of my tasks I can get 4 others done to meet the deadlines and constraints, that is a likely course of action.

so there's my five tips for thinking about tasks. Use them however you like, but you'll find that if you think about these ideas when it comes to deciding what needs to be done, you will have a much easier time setting your priorities.

Comments

zacharyfruhling said…
Dissertation or teaching responsibilities? Dissertation or teaching responsibilities? Dissertation or teaching responsibilities? hmmmm. Never seems to get any easier for me! hahaha!

Popular posts from this blog

Blogging WealthTrack: Christine Benz (Retire Early? Or not?)

 This morning I've watched an interesting video on Consuelo Mack: WealthTrack. Here, Consuelo's guest, a longtime contributor, Christine Benz, a personal finance expert from Morningstar joined Consuelo for a discussion on issues related to retirement, in particular in the current market environments. This conversation is even more interesting against the backdrop of The Great Resignation. I found Christine's advice to be particularly interesting on a couple of fronts. Her advice in dealing with talking about retirement in general, in particular for people who are in the process of thinking about retiring early gave me pause. She is considering the traditional advice of a 4 percent withdrawal rate to be dangerous and indeed, actually concerning. According to the recent research she cites, a 3% withdrawal rate is a better option. Even more than the four percent rule, I think that her comments on annuities are particularly interesting. While annuities have been given a bad nam

More Money Into Ibonds

 At this point, it seems like a well-known strategy for handling inflation: ibonds. While there was not much press about this, it is in fact something that I did late last year in order to capitalize on the fact that this interest rate was bound for up to 10000 dollars as part of my allotment for 2021. Then now that we're in the new year, I have moved another 10000 into the account. All of this can be done easily at http://treasurydirect.gov if you're willing to give up the fact that the money is locked up, that the interest rates to be paid will be somewhat lower than you could earn in the market, and you're able to ensure that you're not needing the money for the near future.  For me personally, I find that this is a great way to lock up about 25% of my emergency (safe) money instead of putting it into a High Yield Savings account. This interest rate changes every six months, but even if it is much lower, I think that we're going to be in much better shape than if

Credit Report Review

So, one of the things that I've started doing is trying to pull my credit reports at regular 4 month intervals so that I get a free one frequently to make sure that things are progressing as I'd like them to and also as a safeguard against identity theft. Of course, the part that I don't like is that these reports don't include a fico score - the key number when it comes to determining if you are going to be extended credit and at what interest rate. This time, I got the report from Equifax - I went to the end of the process and for 8 dollars more I could get my credit score. And the Equifax gave me a credit score of 742. This of course is not even close to the perfect score of 850 when it comes to fico score nirvana, but 742 is still a respectable fico score. Things to improve are basically lowering my balances on my credit cards and loans, which I already have a plan for. And also I noticed that the amount that I paid off on one of my loans is actually still being rep