How to Effectively Prioritize Tasks (Even When They’re All Important)
Author: Brit Harvey
Effective prioritization is essential to completing projects successfully – on time and to a high standard.
Yet, many of us struggle to prioritize. We find it difficult to make decisions about which tasks to complete first and struggle to complete our work in the order most conducive to project success. This is where harnessing prioritization strategies comes into play.
Using the methods below, you’ll be able to prioritize tasks according to their importance to your project, minimize the time you spend on low-value tasks, and reduce uncertainty about what to do next.
1.?? Make a list
To begin prioritizing, you need to know what you need to prioritize.
Write down every task necessary to carry out your project successfully – even those you’re not sure about but pull at your attention anyway. Once you have your ‘master list’ of tasks, you can then start to order them by priority.
2.?? Use the MoSCoW method
MoSCoW is a project management method of prioritizing that allows you to pinpoint the most important features of a project.
Together with stakeholders, use the MoSCoW method to define the tasks for a project as either:
This gives you the ability to eliminate unnecessary tasks from your to-do list, as you learn about what’s important to stakeholders i.e., their priorities.
It also helps to ensure you don’t prioritize project ‘could haves’ – even if they’re interesting or quick to do – and encourages you to stick to working on the most important features of the project.
?3.?? Note the dependencies for each task
An effective project plan always considers the dependencies of different tasks – and this holds true for prioritization of those tasks, too. After all, you can’t work on a task that depends upon the completion of another task if that task hasn’t been completed.
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By noting the dependencies for each task, you’ll see which tasks need to be completed before others, helping you to avoid project bottlenecks.
4.?? Consider the Pareto Principle
You’ve probably heard it said that 80% of outcomes arise from 20% of causes – this is the Pareto principle.
When carrying out a project, roughly 20% of tasks will create 80% of project outcomes. To figure out which tasks should be at the top of your priority list, identify the tasks that comprise this 20%.
A good way to do this is to consider each task through the question: what would happen if we didn’t complete this task?
The more devastating the potential outcome, the higher its priority should be. Make sure to consider all other tasks dependent on the completion of this task when making this judgment.
5.?? Use the ABCDE method
Even after doing all of this, you might struggle to prioritize tasks that all seem to be of the same level of importance.
In this case, it might be time to use Brian Tracy’s ABCDE method. Label all the tasks you judge as having similarly high priority as ‘A’, the next highest priority tasks as ‘B’ and so on until all your tasks have been labelled.
Then, you simply designate each task labelled ‘A’ with a number pertaining to the task you’ll do first, second, third, and so forth. Then, do the same for tasks labelled B, C, D and E.
All that’s left to do is to complete the tasks labelled A in the order you’ve outlined, then B, then C. Try to avoid doing a task labelled with the next letter until you’ve completed all tasks in the previous letter.
This ensures your most important work gets done first and gives you a black-and-white order in which to complete your tasks, minimizing the time you waste making decisions about what to do next.
6.?? Re-evaluate
There’s no point in sticking steadfastly to your priorities if your old priorities don’t bring you closer to your new goals. So, it’s important to re-evaluate your priorities regularly, considering any new goals or alterations to the project. Then, use the methods above once more to make your up-to-date list of priorities, which indicates the tasks you should be working on now.