What do you do when all your tasks are screaming at you ‘do me next!’?
You’ve tried prioritizing your tasks as level 1, 2, or 3 as you’ve been taught, but for some reason, you’ve ended up with mainly 1’s. It’s not working.
So how can you prioritize tasks more effectively?
Our days may seem busier than ever, but you’re not the first to face an overwhelming task list. And many great minds through the ages have developed strategies for making sense of a bloated task list.
Benjamin Franklin devised a daily schedule to encourage peak productivity, possibly the first to document such a framework. Other methods for prioritizing tasks developed as the western world industrialized, too, as knowledge work became commonplace.
Here are 5 old-school prioritization techniques you can use right now to tame your task list and take back control.
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#1: Presidential priorities: how Eisenhower chose what to do next
Two roles that demand much from their occupants are the Presidency and the Chief of Staff of the US Army.
Dwight D Eisenhower filled both roles during an active career, so you know he was a busy man with much to do.
Faced with his own bursting task list, Eisenhower developed a prioritization technique to help him decide which item to do next. It’s a method that now bears his name — the Eisenhower Matrix.
While many base their decision on urgency for which task to do next, Eisenhower looked a little deeper and factored in task importance too.
Here’s the priority matrix Eisenhower invented. Use one yourself to allocate all your tasks into one of the following 4 categories.
- Urgent and Important
- Not Urgent but Important
- Urgent but Not Important
- Not Urgent and Not Important
The urgent and important tasks are the ones you should tackle first. Schedule the important but not urgent tasks for later. Delegate the urgent but unimportant jobs if possible, and discard tasks that are neither urgent nor important.
Want to get a head start? You can implement an Eisenhower matrix in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud using this template.
#2: Select your most important task with Mark Twain’s frog
It’s not unusual to develop the habit of working on smaller, more manageable tasks instead of taking on those big, challenging ones.
Psychologists have given a name for preferring to do small tasks — completion bias.
Completion bias is an addiction to that little hit of dopamine the brain rewards us with when we mark off a job as complete.
But, your most challenging tasks are the ones that likely bring you the most benefit and move you forward.
So if you’re struggling to prioritize your challenging tasks and favoring those easy smaller tasks instead, then you can learn from a principle illustrated imaginatively by Mark Twain, who said:
“If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
The ‘frog’ in this situation is your most daunting task. Rather than avoid the job, attack it head-on as the first task of your day.
The reasoning behind it is this: you’re at your best at the start of the working day, so completing your ‘frog’ first should make the remainder of your priority list less demanding. Thus enabling you to do less challenging tasks as the day goes on as you begin to hit that afternoon slump (we’ve all been there).
To find out your biggest ‘frog’ on staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, check your daily tracker and sort your tasks by Total Hours (Expected).
#3: Prioritizing can be as simple as A B C D E
Simplicity is sometimes best when prioritizing tasks, as you shouldn’t need to remind yourself how your method works.
In Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog, Tracy took Twain’s frog concept one step further.
He shared a strategy for prioritizing all the other frogs on your to do list (everything after your biggest task of the day) using an ABCDE lettering system.
Tracy says he’s used it for years. And while he doesn’t say where he got it from, emergency medics also use a similar ABCDE system to triage patients, as it’s an easy system to remember urgent tasks under pressure.
Perhaps an ABCDE system can work for you when your stress is rising? Here’s how it works.
Assign the letter A, B, C, D, or E to each of your tasks when they meet the following criteria—
A: Top priority tasks with significant consequences for non-completion.
B: An important task with consequences for non-completion, but not essential to do right away.
C: A task that requires your input but does not need you to begin it immediately.
D: Tasks that are not necessary for you to do yourself, so delegate if possible.
E: Items that made it onto your list but are no longer required. Eliminate them.
The ABCDE system is super easy to implement in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud by adding custom priority labels to all of your tasks.
#4: The Ivy Lee method: a 100-year-old technique for focusing your priorities
When faced with a list containing dozens of tasks, it’s easy to lose traction as you attempt to work on more than one simultaneously. However, switching between tasks is inefficient, as it forces you to change mental gears as you make the shift.
Ivy Lee, a pioneer in Public Relations, is perhaps better known for the prioritization system that bears his name.
Lee developed a simple approach to focus on accomplishing major priorities one at a time, which he taught to others, including Charles Schwab.
All that’s required to implement the Ivy Lee method is a pen and pad. (Remember, this was invented longgg before the computer!)
At the end of your working day, select 6 tasks from your main To-Do list you want to complete tomorrow. Then list them down in order of importance.
The next day, tackle your list in strict order and be sure to complete each task in full before moving to the next.
Avoid the temptation to skip down the list to knock off a quick job — that’s the slippery slope to completion bias.
Then, at the end of the day, transfer any incomplete tasks to tomorrow’s list and add further tasks from your master list to bring you back up to 6 in total.
The system works because it forces you to consider your most important priorities and reduces the temptation to multitask.
To implement the Ivy Lee method in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, create an ‘Ivy Lee’ board with custom priorities 1 thru 6. Each evening set up your next day’s work items.
#5: Focus on the right task with the help of a 19th-century Italian Economist
Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist who, in 1896, noticed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.
This observation led scientists to identify several so-called ‘power laws,’ which show a typical mathematical distribution among many diverse things; incomes, city sizes, even software bugs.
The 80/20 power law is also known as the ‘Pareto principle’ based on the guy who created it.
All technical lingo aside, essentially this rule claims that 80% of results tend to come from 20% of inputs, regardless of what you’re talking about.
So, 80% of your productivity is likely only tied to 20% of the items on your task list. The rest are time wasters, inefficient tasks, things better delegated, etc.
But how do you identify those 20% tasks that, when completed, will move you forward the most?
Take your list of tasks and strip out any priorities you currently have. Next, consider each item and think about the impact completing it will have.
Thinking about your tasks’ results will help you prioritize those that have the most significant impact. And let you schedule less productive ones for when you have space.
Finally, based on impact, select 20% of your tasks to put at the top of your list. So, if you have 10 items, you can only pick 2 urgent ones — everything else has to wait.
While it might be almost as painful as choosing your favorite child, following the 80/20 rule will save you from having a lengthy list of all ‘top priority’ tasks.Conclusion
These 5 methods show that just because something is old school doesn’t mean it’s past its prime.
While it’s easy to assume that we’ve never had busier working lives, you aren’t the first to face an intimidating to-do list. Learn a lesson from the old-school productivity experts and try one of these methods on for size.
A good one to experiment with first, though, is the Eisenhower priority matrix. Understanding a task’s importance as well as urgency can bring a real difference to your productivity.
Try implementing it now using this free template.
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