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Why You Should Schedule Your Priorities
Table of Contents
The rate of your productivity success greatly depends on how well you take care of your priorities. Productivity is not just a matter of crossing off tasks on your To-Do List.
Just because you crossed off a majority of your tasks doesn’t mean you’re productive.
Managing Tasks By Managing Time
We usually manage our tasks by managing the time we dedicate to those tasks in a linear fashion. We give everything its own time frame. We tackle one task then move to another.
That is okay if we’re only juggling a couple of tasks each day. If you are like most knowledge workers, handling multiple tasks within a very short time frame is a common scenario.
Our Priorities Are Competing For Attention
Priorities fight for our attention against other priorities. We promote and demote tasks in our list according to what we think needs to be done at a particular time. The demands of the people around us can easily complicate things.
Multitasking or batching tasks into their logical group is a convenient hack that we can employ to ease up the burden of our work. Multitasking may be an efficient technique for related tasks but there are some conditions that don’t allow us to multitask.
Multitasking is not an end-all solution. It is nonetheless an effective method for many jobs out there.
Effective Task Management
There is one method of handling tasks that can surely benefit anyone needing help in the area of task management: Scheduling Priorities.
We never run out of priorities. Some tasks need to be done ahead of other tasks. We have to meet a deadline. We need to satisfy expectations. There is always a need to fulfill — more often than not, that need is someone else’s.
There is always a need to fulfill — more often than not, that need is someone else’s.
There are many variables in our work environment that make it hard for us to do what we want to do in an approach that we prefer. Good luck if you can find a job that will allow you to be on your own doing things your way.
The point is this, you cannot really prioritize tasks the way you want to have them prioritized. Working on something important on your list? Not so fast, the boss wants you to do something else instead. Do you really think that your company aligns with your vision? Well, good luck on that because that is a lie.
The people on top of you will always have the final say on what needs to get prioritized at any given time. You need to schedule your own priorities to balance things off. Always have a cushion. Be ready to bump certain tasks when something unexpected shows up on the door.