Prioritising and To dos
Prioritising
There are a million and one things you could be doing right now. Prioritising is deciding what the one thing is, you should be doing right now. That one thing is your highest priority.
Priority is singular; it comes from the Latin prior- former. It means the one most important thing. You can only have one most important task; in other words you don’t have a list of priorities, you only have one priority.
So how do you determine what your priority is right now? There are different tools and models that you can use to determine what your highest priority is. The first is the Goals to Actions model.
Goals to actions
Before you go any further I recommend at least that you read the blog on Goal Setting. Here you will learn the importance of having direction in the different areas of your life.
Direction comes from your vision and long-term goals, which are in turn broken down in to smaller goals and projects. These smaller goals and projects will then have associated next actions for you to take.
Depending on what your progress is, with these goals, will determine which of your next actions will take priority.
The concept of the different areas of focus of your life, will also determine what a priority is. You may have different areas of focus in your life, but the common ones would include business, health, spouse, family, friends etc. I use the acronym COMBINED.
To ensure you have balance in your life you would therefore prioritise certain tasks above others at certain times of the day or week. For instance my number one priority at the start of my business day is to make my 20 daily sales calls. Once I have done this I can move onto other things.
At other times of day, it becomes a priority to spend time with my loved ones or to perform my exercise routine. At other times, it may be my priority to sit down with a good book.
The Strategic Next Action
My 20 calls a day priority would be an example of a recurring task (see Scheduling for more on this). I call tasks that are not recurring, Strategic Next Actions (SNAs).
These immediate actions will move you forward in your goals. Once they are completed, there will be another SNA to complete. Watch out for the blog coming soon on Managing Projects, for more on SNAs. (Sign up for the newsletter and and you will get it sent automatically).
To do lists
No blog on productivity and goal setting would be complete without the obligatory section on To Do lists. Lists are great and I thoroughly recommend writing things down. In fact, it is essential for the successful person. Ideas and sudden reminders don’t come to you when you expect them to, but when you are engaged in something else or relaxing. That is why I recommend investing in a good pocket notepad and start to jot down everything that comes to mind. You don’t need to action anything just yet; that will come later. Again, see the In-to-Empty concept later in a blog on workflow mastery (Coming soon).
After you process these incoming ideas, some of these will be actionable items. You are then free to add these to a to-do list. See how to write out properly worded actions later.
The next question is where do you track these items? As I said before I am not going into details on the technology you use here, because whether you use an old-fashioned paper method or a task management system, the principle of good self-management is the same.
The first thing you have to get in mind, is that your to do lists will NEVER be completed. The to-do list should merely be a holding point for actions, which you agree to take.
I think of my to-do lists as reservoirs of actionable items, which I am waiting to add to my daily list.
What form should your to do lists take? If you read the on goal setting before, you will see that I use several to-do lists. I have a Single Action list of tasks that are unrelated to any projects or goals.
I have Project lists, which are multi action projects. Following on from this, I also have Project Action lists, so that for each Project, I list the actions related to it.