How do you think you could best prioritise your tasks and workload? What are the best techniques and tools for prioritisation? How can you prioritise to improve efficiency and productivity?

I have a portfolio career and therefore am constantly organising and prioritising events in my calendar, to ensure that I am on top of all my various commitments. Therefore it is no surprise that I have spent a lot of time studying and experimenting with numerous prioritisation techniques.

If you search like I have you will find that there are many strategies for prioritising and tips on time management, so many that it can be overwhelming. Which approach is the best one? But, if you look carefully, you will see they all boil down to the same thing.

Whether you follow the advice of leaders such as Steve Jobs and Dwight Eisenhower or read business experts such as Stephen Covey, Tim Ferris, Brian Tracey or David Allen you will see there is a common theme, even if techniques might differ. Don’t have time to get through all that material? Don’t worry, as I have done that for you, I can give you the executive summary!

So, what is the result? The not-so-secret, irreducible truth at the heart of prioritising is simple:

Do the most important task first. 

You might have been expecting something more but it really is that simple. Let’s go back to a few of the sources so you can see what I mean, then we can put it into practice.

Put First Things First

If you want to be truly productive then you need to prioritise effectively. It is a constant decision-making process, working out what to do next.

“Put first things first” – Stephen R Covey

Putting first things first is one of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It means don’t check your email or your phone until you have achieved that important task!

Most people have a long list of things they need to do. The trick is then to prioritise that list, not to just start at the top and then work down.

Tools such as the Eisenhower Matrix, made popular by Stephen Covey, can help you work out which tasks are important and which are urgent. Alternatively, using the Pareto Principle (a favourite of Timothy Ferris) you can spot and leverage the 20% of work that will get you 80% of the results.

If you set your priorities in this way, it means however the rest of the day goes, you will have done the most important thing first.

But what if you are still struggling?

Be More Steve

The theory is simple, but the practice is often hard. How do you work out what to do when you are feeling overwhelmed? This is the same challenge that Steve Jobs faced, as he said:

“Prioritization sounds like such a simple thing, but true prioritization starts with a very difficult question to answer, especially at a company with a portfolio approach: If you could only do one thing, what would it be? And you can’t rationalize the answer, and you can’t attach the one thing to some other things. It’s just the one thing.” Steve Jobs

So, what you need to do is ask yourself the same question that Steve Jobs used:

If you could do only one thing, what would it be? 

We should always focus on the one thing we can do, on any given day, that takes us closer to success. Finished a task? Ask the same question again and make sure you are doing the next important thing.

If we continue to challenge ourselves with this question we can all ‘Be More Steve’ and be more focussed and productive with our work time.

Ok, so you have identified the top thing on your to-do list. But what if you don’t like the look of the most important task?

Eat That Frog

The most important and impactful thing you need to do may well be a task that you don’t want to do. It could be a difficult conversation you have been avoiding. Maybe it’s that deadline you keep pushing back on. There is a good chance that work that you have been avoiding is the task you most need to tackle.

If that is the case, there is a danger you will – consciously or unconsciously – employ evasion techniques to avoid doing that work. You might convince yourself that it is not really the most important thing or just allow yourself to get distracted.

Stop. Take a deep breath, hold your nose and…eat that frog!

The phrase ‘Eat that Frog’ coined by leadership guru Brian Tracy. It is the discipline of doing the unpleasant task first to get it out of the way. The rationale is that if you have to eat a frog you might as well get it over with first, and fast! The same goes for unpleasant work. There is nothing for it but to get on with it, suck it up, then move on.

The Right Questions Prioritisation Tool: Use PAD for good time-management

So prioritising is simple in theory, but it is hard to do in practice. And once you have identified your most important task it does not stop there. You have looked ahead and identified the most important tasks; now what? This is where effective prioritisation meets good time management.

Having read a lot of books and played with various techniques I have developed a system that works for me, even when juggling multiple roles and responsibilities.

To manage my time I follow the 3 steps in the PAD acronym:

• Prioritise
• Assess
• Diarise or Do

Let’s look at these in a little more detail:

1. Prioritise

First identify your priority tasks. Using something like the Eisenhower matrix, organising tasks into what is either urgent and/or important can be really helpful at this stage.

2. Assess

Once you have worked out your priority tasks you can assign an amount to each. It takes practice to accurately estimate how long an activity will take. One top tip is that I very rarely assign less than 15 minutes to any task, even if it is a simple phone call. More often I give 30 minutes to an hour for each major task. This may sound like a lot for some pieces of work but it builds in the time it takes to switch between tasks or deal with interruptions.

3. Diarise or Do

Finally, the task needs to go in the calendar, or, if it is truly both important and urgent then it should be started as soon as possible.

Top tip: use different colours for different sorts of tasks in your calendar. For example, I have different colours for each of my work roles, and others for family, fitness and other non-work priorities. This helps to achieve a balance between various priorities.

3 steps to better prioritisation and time management

So follow the 3 steps of PAD to prioritise your time. It is not just helpful practically, psychologically this is helpful too. Going through these steps brings clarity and commitment. Clarity, because the process forces you to properly define and organise what needs to be done. Commitment, because once in the calendar, it is more likely you will accomplish the goal.

PAD will help to ensure that your priority tasks get done. If you continue to use it to review your calendar (I do this on a daily basis) it will also help identify other engagements you may need to change, or tasks you need to say no to, in order to achieve your most important work.

So, the question is, now that you have read this, what is the next most important thing you need to do today?