You're juggling urgent project deadlines. How do you decide which tasks to prioritize?

When dealing with urgent, multiple projects deadlines, I prioritize tasks using the impact / cost ratio. Cost can be money, time, customer gain or churn... and impact can be those too. When facing longer tasks, I try to extract low hanging fruits when possible, depending on their impact.

Start by creating a comprehensive task list and identifying deadlines. Assess the importance, urgency, effort, and resources required for each one. Then prioritize list based on the most urgent tasks, considering dependencies and breaking down complex tasks if necessary.

While dealing with urgent project deadlines, I prioritize tasks by assessing their impact (Cost Spent vs Revenue or Value add) and deadlines (Time already spent vs Time needed). Then based on the outcome, I will split the tasks to smaller chunks and create a plan to deliver it in an iterative way. This approach will help me to gain confidence and i will ensure that I meet key deadlines and meanwhile I will stay organized.

When juggling urgent project deadlines, I prioritize tasks by assessing their impact and deadlines. I tackle the most critical and time-sensitive tasks first, then break down larger tasks into manageable steps. This approach ensures that I meet key deadlines while staying organized.

When juggling between urgent projects deadlines, prioritize the tasks with its complexity, low complex and high complex. If we are able to complete the low complex tasks first it gives us the confidence that we were able to complete some out of a good number of tasks. This confidence enables us to pick the tricky ones and meeting the given timelines.

The Eisenhower Matrix is an invaluable time management tool for determining which tasks to tackle first. This method categorizes tasks based on urgency and importance into four categories: Do First, Schedule, Delegate, and Don’t Do. By categorizing your tasks this way, you gain clarity on what requires your immediate attention (urgent and important), what can be planned for later (important but not urgent), what can be delegated to others (urgent but not important), and what can potentially be removed from your list altogether (neither urgent nor important).

It sounds so simple but when approaching a task, always ask yourself if you can complete it in 2 minutes. Most of the time, large complex tasks can have elements which can be done quickly which will reduce the overall workload when you do start taking on the bulk of it. This was a piece of advice I was given at the start of my career and it has make huge tasks SO much simpler. So if you can do a task in 2 minutes or under - whether its a quick email, phone call etc - do it and get it out of the way!

Of course planning and sorting the tasks according to its urgency and important does count and will definitely impact your success to meet the deadlines. Considering this first step is done, you will need to still prioritize them, first thing you need to focus on the dependability of these tasks on each other, one task can be urgent and important but it depends on another minor task. So when you break them down consider the sequence. Second thing if any of these tasks require other stakeholders, please involve them from the very beginning because this will save time, to communicate & align before working on it alone then you realise you will need to implement changes to your work after receiving others input, which will be a waste of time.