How To Prioritise Your Work
This week, I am answering a question on priorities and more specifically, how to prioritise your days and your weeks in an increasingly distracting world.
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Script
Episode 145
Hello and welcome to episode 145 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
are you struggling to stay focused on your priorities? Do you even have the time to decide what your priorities are? I come across this a lot where when so much is being thrown at us by our bosses, colleagues and customers, it feels impossible to decide what our priorities are and even if we know what our priorities are, it feels like the world is conspiring against us to actually get them done.
Well, fear not. in this episode, I will give you everything I’ve learned and practice that keeps me pretty much focused on the things I have decided are my priorities for the day and the week.
Now before we get to the question, I’d like to thank all of you who enrolled in Your Digital Life 3.0. Without your support, I would not be able to do what I do and help so many people. So thank you. I am so grateful to you all.
And don’t forget if you are already enrolled in Your Digital Life, the new version is now in your dashboard on my learning centre, and if you haven’t enrolled, and would like to get yourself enrolled in this amazing course—a course designed to help you build a complete digital productivity and time management system, then you can do so right now. All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kurt. Kurt asks, Hi Carl, I’ve started using Todoist recently and I have copied your Time Sector method for managing my tasks. I like the simplicity. The problem I have is by Tuesday all my plans for the week seems to have been destroyed by all the demands from my boss and my customers. Is there anything you would advise to help stay on my plan?
Hi Kurt, thanks for the question. I know this is an issue for so many people. It comes up in my coaching calls a lot and I receive a lot of emails about it.
How to stay focused on what you have prioritised for the week?
Well, the good thing, Kurt, is you have a plan. That’s a great start. Most people do not have a plan and allow the week and their environment to control what happens to them. That’s never a recipe for success at anything. If you want to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow you need a plan and you need to follow that plan.
That’s the simple answer. But of course, as with most things in life, things are never that simple and distractions, demands and interruptions have a bad habit of getting in the way. So how do you deal with those?
First up, let’s take a step back. Most prioritising problems come about because we are trying to achieve too much at one time. As I am sure you have heard before, life is not a sprint. It’s a marathon and if you start a marathon with your sprint finish you are not going to do very well. You need to pace yourself.
Part of doing that is finding the right balance between the work you want to focus on and the unknown work that will inevitably come in as the week starts. None of us lives in a sealed-off bubble, we are all interacting in some way or another every day and with those interactions will come additional commitments and tasks. So before we even start planning the week, we need to accept those inevitabilities.
That said, knowing that you will get additional work on top of what you planned for means that you are forced to build flexibility into your calendar, and when you allow extra time in your week for the unknowns and they don’t happen (rare, I know) you get a lot of free time. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I take full advantage of that extra time to do whatever I want to do at that moment in time.
So, let’s look at how to stay on the plan in the week.
First up, what is your core work each day and each week? We all have core work. Work you just have to do. If you are in sales that could be meeting your customers, following up prospects and making appointments to see both existing and potential customers. Or if you were a website designer, creating websites would be your core work. The reality is, if you are not doing your core work each day, you would not have a job or a business for very long. So, you need to establish what your core work is and then make sure you are allocating enough time each day to do that work. That is your priority. Your core work. It’s where your income comes from and it’s where your value as an employee or a business owner comes from.
For me, I create content every day. That could be writing a blog post, creating the script for this podcast, recording a YouTube video or an online course. If I allowed other people’s priorities and demands get in the way of creating that content, it would not be long before I would not have a business and therefore a way to help people become better organised and more productive.
So, it is crucial I get my content done first. And that for me is key. As I prepare this script it is 5:30 AM. Not my usual hour of work, but I have a busy day ahead of teaching and I could not see any other time to prepare this script today. My priority for the day is to get this script written. So, when I planned the day last night, I realised I would have wake up early and get it written.
Now, the thing is, I do not normally have to get up so early. But I knew if I left it until the end of the day I would find an excuse not to do it—I would say to myself I could do it Thursday instead of Tuesday, and sure, on Tuesday morning Thursday might look like a quiet day. But there are no guarantees that it would stay that way.
I’ve been down that road before—pushing off work until later in the week only to find I end up with more work to do than I have week left.
So one day of getting up a bit earlier to get the most important task done is a very small sacrifice to make in order to get my priorities done.
So step one is to know what your priority is for the day.
And I use the singular for a reason. As I mentioned above, often the problem is we have far too many priorities. Now, this comes about because you are treating everything as a priority and the reality is not everything is a priority.
I am reminded of a quote by Patrick Lencioni who said:
“If everything is important then nothing is important”
You have to make the decision about what is important and what is not important and I know that can be hard. Often the least important task is the loudest and we are lulled into doing that instead of the quieter, more important task. Knowing what your core work is, understanding what tasks bring you the greatest gain, whether that is financial, professional or personal. These are the things you need to know before you begin planning out your week and your day.
This is why I advise you to do your daily planning the night before and not in the morning. Planning the night before removes you from the hustle and bustle, it allows you to step back and take a bigger picture view of what you have to do. It gives you greater clarity and you are free from the distractions that a workplace brings—even if that workplace right now is your home. It allows you to compare where you are, and where you hoped to be according to your plan. You can then make the necessary adjustments.
Again, when it comes to making adjustments you will need to look at what your priorities are. I’m no longer afraid of cancelling a few appointments or meetings if it means I get my core, prioritised work done.
Not that was not always the case. I used to prioritise meetings and appointments. But over time I discovered that a lot of my meetings and appointments were not achieving the desired results and certainly did not take my objectives forward as much as doing my core work. Once I discovered that it became much easier to make my excuses and not attend the meeting.
Once you have your plan for the day, start the day with your number one priority. Get it started, I may not finish this script by the time I need to prepare to leave, but if I get 75% of it done, then later in the day, knowing I only have 25% to do, I am much more likely to sit down for 30 minutes later in the day to get it finished.
Often the hardest part of any task is just getting started. So, knowing that, if you can just do something with your most important task for the day first thing, you start the momentum and that gives you a greater chance of getting it finished before the day ends.
The next thing I would advise is to make sure your priorities for the day are written down somewhere you will see them.
We know we are going to get distracted and interrupted. There’s nothing you can do about that, but once you have dealt with the interruption, you need a way to quickly get back on track. Having your priorities written down either on a piece of paper on your desk or in a To-do list manager you actually look at, will make it much easier for you to get back on track.
Now, when I say have a list of your priorities for the day written down, I do not mean have them listed in amongst all the low-priority tasks. I mean you have a single list with just your top one or two tasks for the day on. Nothing else. It’s this list that will keep you focused.
If you have them on a list with all your other tasks for the day, you are just going to start looking for the low hanging tasks—the easy ones—in the false belief that if you can just get you list down in number you will have had a productive day. Sure, you may have got a lot done, but you got a lot of low-value work done at the expense of the more important high-value work. Just do not do that.
If you are using a digital to-do list manager, like Todoist, you can use the flags to highlight your priority tasks and then use filters to hide away all your other tasks until you have completed those high-value ones.
Ultimately, it comes down to this, Kurt. Stop trying to do everything all at once. For one, you will never do it and secondly, you’ll either get so frustrated you will give up planning altogether or you will burn yourself out. Neither option seems very appealing.
Instead, decide what your core, high-value work is. Make that the foundation of your priorities every day and spread out the bigger tasks throughout the week, rather than trying to do them all in one day.
There’s a saying in British politics attributed to former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, that “a week is a long time in politics”. The truth is a week is a lot longer than you think and when you plan out the week, decide what your must do, high priority tasks are and keep them to a minimum, you will find you have plenty of time to get the sudden, unplanned for emergencies done as well as those high-value tasks you decided you were going to get done that week.
It takes time, it takes consistent practice, but as long as you persevere, adjust where necessary and stay focused on the task at hand, you will get there and making sure your priorities take priority every day will become second nature.
Good luck and thank you for the question.
Thank you also to you for listening and just a heads up, This podcast is now, finally, on Spotify. So if you are a Spotify user, you can now subscribe to this podcast right there.
It just remains for me now to wish you all, a very very productive week.