How to Do Things

In today’s competitive world, it is very important to be multitasking at your workplace and personal life as well. Multitasking will differentiate you from other employees at work and help you succeed in life. However, to be good at multitasking, you should know ‘how to prioritize work’.

Prioritizing helps you order and re-order your tasks continuously, so that you achieve your targets and set goals. Your boss will not ask you. and hand over a task to you, rather he would just give you a task and a deadline to it. In this case, you need to know ‘how to prioritize work’ and ‘how to prioritize workload’. Work prioritizing is prioritizing the task given to you, and workload prioritizing is ordering the tasks involved in completing one’s work, so that you complete you work in time.

How to prioritize work?

In your office always have a chart put up on your desk. This chart will help you in prioritizing work and completing your work on time. You can revise this weekly or fortnightly, as needed.

List or Chart:

• Make a chart of your weekly targets or fortnightly target. List down the different tasks you need to complete. Make a chart having five columns. Have a look at the chart below for your reference:

• Your rough chart of work will look something like this. This includes all the tasks you need to complete in a given span of time.
• Next step will be rearranging the chart as per the level of priority and urgency. Your rearranged chart will actually help you choose your most important work.

Rearranging the Chart:

• This chart will thus help you focus on the most important work first. For example, in this case, you have to get the ‘Tender details’ urgently, as this is very high on priority and urgency. May be you might lose a contract if you delay this work. This is thus on the top of your work chart.
• Now based on time constraints you have, you can pick up a task first. For example, you need to finish the entire work in one week. You had a long meeting one day and thus you cannot afford to waste a day or else you won’t be able to complete your work.
• In this situation, when you have very less time left for the day, you can choose ‘list of new suppliers’ as this requires least time and least efforts. Also, you will complete one of your tasks from the work chart.
• This means, though you make a work chart and arrange things accordingly, still unexpected meetings or discussions may disturb your work schedule. You thus have to be wise and pick up a work, so that you do not waste your time and complete your work in the given time.

Delegating Work:

• Another important factor is that if you work in a team or you are a team lead, and these are the tasks for the week handed over to your team, you should know how to effectively delegate work to the teammates, based on skills and priority.
• Delegation will help you share the workload as well as complete your work in time.

The information written above will help you learn ‘how to prioritize work’. Even if the work is handed over to you alone, or the entire team, this method of prioritizing work will help you tackle with your workload, and you can be an efficient and smart worker. This will help you succeed at your workplace.

You always envy others when you see them enjoying their weekends and spending money on stuff they want to, but you cannot. If you are always caught up with pending work, bills, etc. you need to learn how to prioritize your life.

Prioritizing will help you live your life in a disciplined way. It will let you take control of your life rather than your life taking control of you. This simple rule in your life will help you live a smooth life without much hustle and bustle.

Follow the instructions given below and learn how to prioritize your life:

Spend time with yourself:

• At some point of time in your life, you will feel that things are getting out of control and nothing is going on as per your plans, and you start losing hope.

• At this point it becomes important for you to spend time alone, think where you have been wrong, think about your goal and not get distracted by anything in life.

Think:

• You need to think with a calm mind. For this, you have to get rid off all the frustration and distractions disturbing you.

• Do what helps you to get rid of this frustration, so that you can again start thinking with a fresh beginning. Dance, music, a game of tennis, anything that helps you get rid of your frustration.

Listing priorities:

• Next step is prioritizing things in your life. Your education, career, family, wife, children, friends, etc. This differs at every stage in your life.
• Being a student, education and career will be your priority, and once you are settled in your job, your family will be your priority.
• People usually fall into trouble when they fail to understand what they should prioritize at a particular time in life.
• Listing down various elements that are important in your life will help you know your priorities. Sometimes you tend to concentrate on things that do not matter much and realize it later.
• Once you have made a list, rearrange it starting with the one with the highest priority in life.
• Remember to carry this list with you always. Also, make a big chart of the same and place it in your room, at a place where you can constantly see it.
• Placing a chart in front of your eyes will help you maintain your focus.

Follow:

• Usually we tend to make resolutions, or such focus charts but we fail to follow it. In order to prioritize your life and live it according to your wish, you need to FOLLOW what you have decided.

• ‘Following’ needs discipline, and discipline will make your life simpler.

Using these simple instructions, you can prioritize your life. However, you need to understand that, to succeed in prioritizing your life, you just cannot escape by making a list. You need to understand the vitality of the list and thus follow it with discipline.

You are the in charge of a certain project, handed over to by your boss, and you need to complete the project in time with utmost efficiency, then you must know how to prioritize projects.

A project is a task, which has to be accomplished in a given period of time, has set goals, and sometimes is a part of a bigger project. You need to know why prioritizing is important and how you can prioritize your project.

Prioritizing helps you to save time, save resources, energy and complete an assigned project in a given period of time. When you prioritize, you not only complete, but efficiently complete your project.

Let us understand how to prioritize projects with the help of an example. Take a simple example of home makeover and repair. Suppose you are assigned with this task or project, and you use your prioritizing skills, you will save time and resources.

How to prioritize a project?

We will understand this concept using the example stated above. Use the instructions given below to prioritize your project:

• Take a piece of paper. Fold it into two equal halves vertically, then two equal halves horizontally. This will give you four different blocks on your paper.

• You have to use these blocks to segregate your tasks on the basis of cost and effort.

• Your paper will look as shown below:

• Once you are ready with this, you will have to make another list. The list of tasks involved in the makeover and repairing of your home.

• The list will include tasks like- packing and moving, buying goods, arranging for contractors, renovation work, supervision, cleaning, repacking and moving back.

• Once you have this list prepared with you, start placing the tasks one by one in the columns made on the paper. You will have to place different tasks in different blocks depending upon the cost involved and effort involved in every task.

• For example- Task 1: Packing: Packing will not involve any cost if you and your family pack the goods yourself. However, it will be high on efforts. You will thus place this in ‘Low Cost/ High Effort’ block.

• Task 2: Arranging a Contractor: Now this task is low on effort, but definitely high on cost. You can get the information of the contractor easily over the internet, but you will have to pay a hefty amount for his services, thus you will place this in ‘High Cost/Low Effort’ block.

• Task 3: Planning the Finance: You need to plan a budget for your project. This task will not involve any cost, and will not require much effort. You can place this in ‘Low Cost/Low Effort’ block.

• Task 4: Supervision: Suppose you are a kind of person, who despite of handing over a task to someone would like to check it yourself. In this case, you are paying that person, but still by continuously supervising, you are incurring efforts. So this will be in the ‘High Cost/High Effort’ block.

• Once you are done with this segregation, choose where you wish to concentrate more. Which block’s tasks are more important and cannot be completed without you? For example, packing and moving cannot be completed without you, but supervision can be ignored.

• You thus need to pay more attention to the tasks which need your efforts.

• In this way, segregating tasks in different columns will help you pick the one’s you find most important and work accordingly.

• Also, by prioritizing you will not miss out on any of the tasks, and complete everything in time.

Follow this method to prioritize your project or task, and complete it in time with efficiency.

Many times in life, we face a lot of situations when we think that we should have concentrated on other matters, rather than the one we were concentrating on. To avoid such guilt in life, we should know how to prioritize. Prioritizing helps us save time, and focus on vital things first.

Prioritizing is important to live a smooth functioning life where you can enjoy your life and your work. Every element in our life has a different level of importance. We need to understand the corresponding importance with the corresponding element, and plan accordingly. We need to analyze and have proper time management to focus on different elements of life.

Follow the tips or instructions given below and learn ‘how to prioritize’.

At every stage of life, different aspects of your life have different vitality. Being a child, education and sports is the priority; in youth, education and career is the priority, and in adulthood, family, job and responsibilities. You need to understand in which phase of your life you stand, and prioritize accordingly.

List down elements:

• Make a list of what things/elements you think according to you need to be considered seriously. Once you have done this, move to the next step.

Mark for Urgency:

• Suppose you have listed down ten things, now rank them for the level of importance or urgency.

• You can either use colors, or write ‘most urgent’ or ‘least urgent’, or rank by numbers besides each element in the list.

• You can also use ‘L’ for low-level importance, ‘M’ for medium, and ‘H’ for high level.

Have an aim:

• Be it something simple like completing homework before your favorite TV show starts, preparing for exams, cleaning the house, etc. You need to set an aim and know what is more important for you at that particular time of your life.

• If you decide that your priority is completing homework, then plan your schedule accordingly. Here you have prioritized certain elements of your daily routine.

• Using the list you jotted down and ranked, you can easily set your aim.

Efforts Required:

• Once you have ranked the list, you can directly aim one of them. However, if you are thinking about resources, then besides each topic in the list, you can mention the ‘efforts’ or ‘resources’ required.

• This effort or resource listing will help you prioritize further. Suppose something ranked ‘M’ (medium) on the list needs resources that are easily available, you can finish off the task easily. Hence, rather than opting for something that will need quite a lot of time in collecting resources you can choose this one.

• Ranking and listing the efforts or resources will help you to prioritize.

Rearrange the list:

• Once you have ranked the elements for the level of importance or urgency, you need to rearrange the list.
• Place the one’s ranked highest on importance and urgency first, followed by medium and then low.
• Pick up the one listed on the top in this rearranged list. This is of the highest priority for you, so you have to first concentrate on this element or task in your life

Choose one element from the list with the help of instructions given above and complete it accordingly. You will thus understand ‘how to prioritize’ and also the ‘importance of time management’. Once you learn to prioritize, you can easily manage time; complete your tasks, work, and projects on time. Most importantly, you will learn to prioritize your life.

Try these tips next time when you wish to prioritize.