The enforced work from home has forced everyone into constant triage of tasks and assignments. It could be constant remote meetings with teams, retain and acquire new customers and ramping up to meet demand. We continue to struggle with myriad challenges: stay productive, care for our family, stay healthy.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed, leaving us unsure of where to begin. Focus on two criteria - importance and urgency. Stephen Covey popularised a matrix using these criteria which can be adapted to conditions. Prioritise your assignments on these two axes, and decide what you can delegate, eliminate or postpone to focus on what is critical.
How to prioritize
- Prepare a to-do list, including tasks that are being discussed every day in meetings.
- Organize to-dos by different projects, teams, spheres of work.
- Define importance in terms of probability of success, impact, competitive advantage, value, cost, risk.
- Define urgency in terms of time frame, consequences, benefits of completing or delaying a task.
- Plot your tasks on a matrix of importance and urgency.
Tasks that are important and urgent must be tackled immediately and instead of talking about it tackle them head-on.
Tasks that are important but less urgent are key to reach your goals but need not be done immediately. Schedule a specific time and an outer limit to complete.
Tasks that are urgent but not important, are not central to your goals and can be delegated to others.
Finally, some tasks are neither urgent nor important. Close them out quickly. Eliminate outdated tasks, explore is some tasks can be converted into quick wins by completing with less effort.
This prioritising would be important especially when teams are lost and disorganised. Discuss with the team and prioritise and identify ways you can schedule tasks, tasks that can be set aside for now. This matrix should be dynamic and reviewed at regular intervals. This would help the team focus on what requires the most attention.
Conquer Your To-Do List With This Simple Hack
by Ellen Auster and Shannon Auster-Weiss HBR August 06, 2020
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