How do you prioritize time-sensitive tasks while still allowing space for creative brainstorming sessions?

One of the most powerful driving forces for assessing urgency is collaboration. By gaining insights and perspective from a diverse group of stakeholders, it often unveils priorities that you may have not considered in your assessment, and reveals connections to other factors, departments, or products. For example, if you are developing a feature for a software product, collaboration with other stakeholders may show the same feature has uses in other products and may increase the urgency for that feature to be completed. This knowledge can allow the product owner (or other leadership figure) to place the item higher on their backlog or priority list.

Assessing the urgency of different components of a problem helps streamline the overall solution. By prioritizing tasks, you can create a timeline that balances immediate needs with time for creative brainstorming. This approach ensures that critical issues are addressed promptly, while still allowing room for innovative solutions, keeping everything on track and moving forward efficiently.

Having a routine is key for time-blocking. One of the important parts of the time-blocking routine is having a consistent ratio of how you allocate your time, and sticking to it. Allocate the same percentage of your time each day or week to specific efforts. You should spend the same amount of time each week responding to emails, scheduling and attending meetings, collaborating, researching, conducting data analysis, etc. When first starting with time blocking, this consistency allows you to assess what is working and what is not much more easily, and tweak your process until it is most effective for your position. Once you have streamlined your time-blocking, adjusting for urgent items on the agenda becomes less disruptive.

Task prioritization can be viewed as the combining of your urgency analysis and time blocking schedule. As a result of your collaborate perspective and consistent scheduling, you should have a much clearer idea on what tasks should be prioritized during your week. Prioritizing tasks should be done with the interest of both the impact to the company and stakeholders. If your task list has items that cannot be completed, you should assess what mitigation efforts are available for reducing the negative consequences associated with not completing tasks. If there are clear mitigation efforts for one task, it should be given a lower priority compared to tasks that will have more negative consequences associated with failure to complete.

With a clear priority list, it is time to delegate. Often the task list exceeds what someone is capable of completing on their own. As a leader in your organization, whether formal or informal, you should have a clear understanding of what your team is capable of. Delegation is where the strength of cross-functional teams shines. By investing the effort to develop a team with many skills, delegating tasks becomes less of an exercise in dictating, and more of an exercise in empowerment. A solid team allows a leader to push decision making and task completing to where the information is. By trusting your team to handle tasks, you allow them to showcase their own expertise and skills, while you to dedicate your time where it is needed most.

While routine and regularity is not typically associated with flexibility, those who use time-blocking and agile project approaches know it is one of the cornerstones of these methods. Cross-functional teams who collaborate and have regular, uninterrupted time for completing tasks, have very little difficulty handling the unexpected when it arises. These teams strive on daily collaboration, have a lot of experience estimating the effort needed to complete tasks, and helping each navigate disruptions to work. Embracing flexibility like this enables teams to handle disruptions without derailing the efforts of you and your team.

Embracing flexibility is crucial in problem-solving. With constant moving parts, adapting to changes allows for more creative solutions and prevents burnout. Staying open to new information and shifts keeps you from feeling stuck, helping you approach challenges with a fresh perspective and avoid hitting a wall during the process.

Agile teams hold regular reviews and retrospectives to assess the effectiveness of their efforts. In the review, stakeholders provide collaborate input, allowing a diverse perspective on the teams efforts. After this review, the team conducts a retrospective among themselves to discusses their efforts in a safe environment. This consistent self-reflection leads to the best processes for each teams unique requirements. Even in non-agile environments, consistent self reflection is well known for helping teams and individuals to improve their approach in nearly all aspects of life. Making mistakes or failing can be quickly turned into lessons on how to do better next time if you take the time to reflect on what went wrong.