The importance of prioritising

What are we busy doing?
Nearly everyone I meet says “I am so busy”. It’s interesting to know why they are so busy and what they are busy doing. Sometimes I ask the question “What are you so busy with?” I sometimes wonder if they are busy with the right things.

Long hours at work?
It is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking we are being highly productive or effective just because we are working long hours at work but are we working effectively? I know some people who are excellent at doing the right things and they don’t work 80 hours per week to achieve it. In fact the people who work very long hours are often working ineffectively because they get burnt out and thus become less productive. I try to balance my work with the rest of my life so that I am not just working long hours and missing out on the other important things. It doesn’t always work out that way and deadlines sometimes put my life out of balance for a time but under normal circumstances I find I work more effectively by being more focussed during my working day, without having to extend the working hours.

What is important?
You may be busy doing things that aren’t the most important. It is too easy to forget what is really important to you and be busy doing other things. As an example you may be busy answering all your emails including the ones that don’t need you to respond, or you may get caught in the trap of surfing the net for long periods searching for trivial things. Other people’s priorities sometimes aren’t the same as yours. It is easy to fall into this trap and march to someone else’s tune. Now I know that sometimes other people’s priorities should become your priority (eg a customer request for a quote, a billing deadline) but don’t always jump to do something just because someone else says it’s important to them.

Prioritising
We all fall into the trap of sometimes not working out what our priorities are.

Stephen Covey in his book “the 7 Habits” wrote about doing the right things. He divided tasks into 4 quadrants based on their importance or their urgency. Almost everyone works on the tasks that are important and urgent. Covey maintains that the really effective people were the ones who put time into the important and non-urgent tasks (see quadrant 2 in the chart below). These tasks are typically the more strategic ones like planning and longer term strategic projects.

When planning your work remember to think very carefully about the time you will spend on tasks in quadrant 2. For the not important tasks (quadrant 3 and 4) you should avoid these altogether or delegate them.

Planning your work
I remember a management course I attended some years ago where we were split into teams and given a task which had to be completed in a set time limit. The tasks involved such things as making the longest bridge from newspaper. We also had to measure the time we spend planning the task and time we spent doing it. At the beginning of the course our group would busily dive into the task with hardly any planning at all – typically we would spend 10% of the time planning and 90% doing. The results were very poor. By the end of the course we were spending about 80% of the time planning and 20% doing. Our team had worked out that with effective planning we would achieve far better results and we did.

If you really spend a good amount of time thinking about and planning your work you will be more productive and much more effective.