Overloaded with Tasks? Try These Techniques to Build a Better?Schedule
Waleed Al Maawali
CEO iLab Marine | Marine Mechatronics | Environmental IoT | Ocean Robotics | Social Entrepreneur
The Art of Prioritizing Your Daily Life Effectively
Whether you’re a student, entrepreneur, or just an ordinary worker, there have been times where we were overwhelmed with tasks! Maybe too much to do next week? How to organize your day? I have seen many people fail to deal with these difficulties, and here I’m revealing the secret that helped me to overcome such overload.
The secret is simply: Prioritize
Yes, you heard it! You have to decide which tasks are important and which are not. Although this is mainly based on your personal judgment, the Eisenhower Matrix allows prioritizing your tasks based on two factors: importance and urgency. So grab a pen and paper, and organize your tasks for the week in the table below.
Each quadrant of the table represents a level of priority:
- Urgent and important (Do): these tasks should receive high priority and must be accomplished immediately, most likely on the same day. Examples could range from attending an emergency meeting to fixing a bug within an app after a sudden crash.
- Not urgent but important tasks (Schedule): these tasks should receive attention for the long-term success of your life and productivity in your work, but don’t require immediate action. You should schedule them for later. Two examples are: learning a new skill needed for work and preparing one month ahead for an exam. You will see later what to do further with these tasks.
- Urgent but not important (Delegate): such tasks are not important because you may lack skills and/or time to perform them now. They could range from handling customer complains, to hanging out with friends. These tasks don’t belong to you and should be delegated to others to maintain maximum productivity (tell your friend to hang out with others!). You can kindly ask a member of your team or organization to handle the task or refer to someone in your network who can help.
- Not urgent and not important (Ignore): eliminate them from your schedule. They will waste your time and reduce productivity. Unfortunately, we tend to do a lot of unimportant tasks for leisure, and then complain about time. Be focused on important tasks first!
Nobody is too busy. It’s just a matter of priorities.
Next: Know your deadlines
Every job has a specific deadline. Well, every important task has a deadline. Deadlines help us further prioritize tasks in order to avoid cluttering. There are two types of deadlines:
- Sharp deadlines: must not be missed whatsoever was the reason. One can decide whether the deadline is sharp by looking at the outcome after doing the task. If the value of the outcome is zero, then the task has a sharp deadline. Suppose you’re responsible for generating tomorrow’s weather forecast. You get to your office, get a bunch of data, and then make the report. Generally, you have 24 hours to publish the report. If the deadline was missed, there is no value of the forecast as the “next day” will be “today”.
- Soft deadlines: they incur a penalty when missed. For example, some school assignments allow missing deadlines but with a reduction in grade. Missing deadlines for delivery businesses may affect reputation or revenue.
Here we should distinguish two types of tasks: tasks decided by others, and tasks decided by us. When the task is set by others, we tend to consider the deadline as sharp. Tasks we decide upon tend to have soft deadlines. This is due to a lack of clarity in the future and laxity of our thinking.
In addition, the closer the deadline, the sharper it becomes, as illustrated below. Thus, our “do” tasks should mainly contain tasks with a sharp deadline. Our “schedule” tasks usually contain tasks with a softer deadline.
Setting Realistic Deadline
Deadlines are numbers. Here I’m presenting simple guideline to decide which deadlines work best for some tasks:
- Know the worse case completion time: how long does it takes to complete the task if everything went unfavorably? A day, a week, or a month? Try breaking down tasks that take longer than a day to execute into smaller manageable sub-tasks.
- Order subtasks into chronological order: that will tell you when the job should start and when it should end.
Deciding upon the worse case completion time depends heavily on our capabilities. An expert can build an app in hours, while a newbie can take a month. By breaking down complex jobs into smaller tasks, one has a clear roadmap on how to reach the goal.
Not all deadlines are exact. For instance, you may have routine jobs that are performed on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. You may also breakdown large tasks into smaller periodic subtasks. Routine tasks have a deadline that’s before the occurrence of the next task.
Couldn’t you decide on a deadline for some tasks? These are generally not urgent. You may “ignore” them for now, or “schedule” them far away from the urgent ones.
Now, what to do?
Sure enough, you should focus on important jobs first. Here, I’m going to explain how I handle each set of tasks.
“Do” Tasks
These tasks should appear on your daily to-do list. I like to write them on a sticky note, a night before my day or early morning, and place it on the most frequently used item, my laptop. You could stick it on your notebook or the phone as well. I have used this technique for years and it helped me to maintain focus on relevant tasks. It’s crucial to write down important tasks!
By the end of the day, you may be in one of the following situations:
- All tasks were accomplished: Hurray! Now you have some extra time. You can celebrate by doing something you love or do one of the “schedule” tasks. However, this is often not the case.
- Some tasks were not fully completed: as humans we tend to underestimate the time required to do a job. These tasks cannot be finished within a day, and you now realized that. To avoid such a situation, breakdown large tasks into smaller chunks that can be accomplished easily and quickly, then use Eisenhower Matrix to re-prioritize them.
- Couldn’t execute some tasks: that’s totally OK! These tasks were not that important (else, you shouldn’t sleep the night without doing them) or they were not that urgent (else, why you didn’t do them?). Simply, they were wrongly prioritized. You should delegate these tasks to others or re-schedule them.
“Schedule” Tasks
These are the tasks that will appear on your weekly or monthly calendar. The main concern is how to order them. Here I’m presenting two very simple yet useful methods which have been proven to be effective:
- Most Frequent First (MFF): perform the most repeating tasks first. We tend to do that by nature. I tend to check my emails regularly. Intuitively, the number one thing I do after waking up is checking emails! You might also be experiencing the same when grabbing your daily coffee!
- Earliest Deadline First (EDF): start with the job with the closest deadline, and then move to the next. Remember that these tasks have a harder deadline.
You should use MFF when most of the tasks are routine with clear and known deadlines. Usually this is the case with students and everyday workers. EDF is more dynamic and allows adjustment of schedule when many unexpected interruptions could happen. This is the case with entrepreneurs and managers.
Theories have proven that MFF and EDF are optimal, meaning that they guarantee no deadline misses. Additionally, if your MFF or EDF schedule couldn’t maintain deadlines, then no other scheduling technique would do!
Of course that’s in the theory. In practice, MFF and EDF allow one to accomplish most tasks before the deadline.
Effective Tools
I have been using Microsoft To Do for a year and it had been very effective in organizing my daily to-dos and scheduling important tasks. One can set a due date and visualizing the tasks in chronological order.
Other tools are Google Keep and Trello which have proven to be good and effective. Whatever tool you’re using, it worth noting again to write down all important tasks!
Dealing with interruptions
In reality, nothing goes as planned. Unexpected random jobs can occur from your manager, teacher, family, or elsewhere. You should deal with them carefully, as they may ruin the whole schedule and result in missing deadlines. They may build up as well if delayed. Perform them during your slack time, or prioritize as we did earlier.
Missing Deadlines
It could be hard to miss a deadline intentionally, but sometimes we have to. When sharp and soft deadlines clutter in one day, we have to fulfill sharper deadlines first. We have to accept the penalty incurred by missing soft deadline tasks, or delegate them to someone else.
Final Thoughts
You have been so patient reading this article! I’m summarizing key takeaway points for you:
- Use the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize your tasks.
- Breakdown complex tasks into smaller steps that can be accomplished within one day (in the worst case).
- Every day, construct a to-do list with the urgent and important tasks. Put the list somewhere visible to be reminded throughout the day. Perform these tasks first.
- Schedule the less urgent tasks using MFF or EDF in your calendar. Perform these tasks after accomplishing your daily to-dos.
I hope you’re able to make good schedules now!
Technical note: some of the techniques presented here were originally developed for real-time systems. It’s surprising how these techniques extend beyond operating systems to touch every aspect of our lives. I would like to thank Prof. Medhat Awadalla for explaining the theory behind these systems, and correlate them to our daily life.
Excellent and comprehensive article .. Thank you Waleed