How to Prioritize Tasks for Greater Productivity

Prioritizing means deciding what is important in your life and spending time accordingly. With a never-ending number of things you could be doing at any given time, it’s essential to have a process in place that adds focus to your life and work. Prioritizing gives you direction by helping you understand what tasks will effectively progress you toward the goal. 

Discover the essential nature of prioritization and explore a step-by-step guide on how to set priorities to begin gaining focus and order for your to-do list. 

What does prioritizing mean?

Prioritizing is a general term that describes how you decide which goals, tasks, or activities to complete and the order to complete them based on those most urgent or pressing. Whenever you spend your time, attention, focus, or energy on a task, you can help relieve stress, tiredness, and burnout when you practice prioritization. 

You can prioritize your work schedule and decide the most effective order in which to complete your daily work tasks. For instance, you might prioritize cleaning your house by deciding the activities you can complete in the amount of time you have allocated to clean. Or, you could arrange your weekend chores to ensure you accomplish the most satisfying or essential tasks before the weekend ends.

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Why is prioritizing important? 

Prioritizing helps you focus on the highest-priority tasks—those that are worth your time and attention. It also enables you to understand whether your current work will help you accomplish your long-term goals. 

Learning how to do this can help you increase your productivity because you aren’t accidentally spending time on less important tasks. It can also help lower your stress level because you can clearly understand what can wait and what you must do now. Prioritizing is also motivational because it helps you observe progress in real-time. Higher motivation levels help you reduce procrastination. As a whole, prioritizing can help you reduce feelings of overwhelm and help you feel empowered. 

In your personal life

Prioritizing the things you spend your time on at home can also impact your life. When you set clear priorities for yourself, making decisions or having confidence in yourself can be easier because you’ve taken the time to think about what success looks like. By setting priorities, you can move through your day with a clear objective and accomplish tasks you identify as important. 

Prioritizing can also help you save money at home. Considering your priorities, you might decide you’re spending money in places that distract you from your goals. After you’ve set your priorities, it’s easier to understand what those distractions look like. 

In your workplace

Prioritizing at work can help you increase your efficiency, which can, in turn, improve job performance. If you make any decisions for the company or influence strategy in any way, it will be easier for you to do your job if you have a clear idea of the company’s priorities. Clear priorities help reduce busy work, so you have time to focus on more critical objectives. 

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How to prioritize tasks

Although sometimes prioritizing tasks is a casual process, such as deciding it’s more important to finish a home renovation project than to watch the latest episode of your favorite TV show, prioritizing can also have structure. Following the steps below may make it easier to prioritize your tasks and help you practice a good strategy for prioritizing in the future.

• Make a list of tasks: Write down every task you must complete. If it’s easier, you can create categories to help organize your tasks, such as daily, weekly, monthly, and incidental tasks. By gathering everything in one spot, you take the first step to organizing them. 

• Determine the order of tasks you need to complete: Start with the categories that you created in the last step. You must complete daily tasks today, while other duties can wait if needed. For any less obvious task, ask yourself whether you must truly do it today or whether it could wait. 

• Allot time for each task: When you estimate how much time you need to complete each task, it helps you better understand what you can realistically accomplish in any given time frame. If you’re not sure how long to estimate in the beginning, don’t worry. The more you do it, the easier it will be to guess how much time any individual task will need. 

• Focus on one task at a time: Multitasking can give you the feeling of getting lots of work done, but the best way to cross tasks off your to-do list is to focus on them one at a time. 

Prioritization methods

Another helpful approach to learning how to prioritize tasks is to employ a strategy others use. It is a skill like any other, and sometimes, when you’re learning a new skill, it helps to think about the subject from several different angles. These methods offer various ways to think about and approach prioritizing tasks, and you may find them helpful in your planning. 

The ABC method

This method begins by gathering all the work you must do and then sorting those tasks into three piles. In pile A, place the critical items that you must do immediately. Use pile B for regular business and pile C for anything else you might like to do. Another variation of this method is to use ABCDE and assign each task a letter ranking, with “A” being the most critical work and “E” the least. 

The Ivy Lee method

The Ivy Lee method, named after a productivity consultant hired by Charles Schwabb in 1918, is a simple method of prioritizing tasks. At the end of each day, create a list of six things you want to accomplish the following day, with the first item being the most critical task. Start your next day by immediately tackling the first item on your list. Using this method helps you avoid the morning haze of not knowing what to start on first and instead jump straight into your work. 

The 1-3-5 method

The 1-3-5 method helps you think about priorities without committing to more than you can accomplish in one day. The idea is that you will identify one critical task you must do today. You will then identify three medium tasks, potentially relating to that task of the day but not necessarily. Last, you’ll add no more than five tasks that require a smaller amount of mental energy, such as making a phone call or attending a weekly meeting. 

Eisenhower Matrix

The Eisenhower Matrix is a matrix for prioritizing work that explores the relationship between importance and urgency. A task can be vital, such as filing your taxes. But filing your taxes doesn’t become urgent until you get close to the tax deadline. The Eisenhower Matrix is a plot graph where the horizontal axis measures urgency, and the vertical axis measures importance. After ranking each task by importance and urgency, you can visualize your essential tasks based on what quadrant of the graph they fall in. 

More tips for prioritizing tasks at work and home

Now that you’ve learned the basic steps to prioritizing tasks and explored several methods for prioritizing priority, explore a few more tips to help you practice and become even more focused and efficient. 

Make use of apps and other tech tools.

With a computer or a smartphone, you have access to a wide range of productivity tools to help you plan and prioritize tasks, track what you spend your time on, stay focused for set periods, and track long-term goals. 

Delegate 

Prioritizing goes hand in hand with delegating or assigning tasks to other people. Whether you’re asking for help on a project at work, asking your spouse to pick up a few items from the grocery store, or asking your children to tidy up the house, reaching out to others for help with completing tasks is a good way to manage your stress and prevent yourself from taking on too much. 

Plan for interruptions

Between your cell phone notifications, emails pinging your laptop, and work-related phone calls, you need more prioritization to prevent interruptions while you work. Instead of being frustrated by them, try to plan time for them in your schedule. A technique such as the Pomodoro method for focusing is to set a timer for 20 to 30 minutes and focus during that time. Next, program a five to 10-minute timer for a break. Running through this cycle builds breaks into your workflow, so when non-essential interruptions happen, you can simply make a note to deal with it on your next break. 

Set boundaries

Setting boundaries means protecting your time from things that move you away from your goal and keeping clear expectations for what you can accomplish in a day. Setting boundaries might look like being realistic with yourself that you won’t be able to finish a project in a single afternoon. Or setting boundaries might look like declining to work overtime at work. Your boundaries should reflect your priorities, so you’re guarding your time for what matters most. 

Complete your least-favorite task first: Eat the frog. 

Mark Twain once advised that if you were in a situation where you had to eat a live frog, for whatever reason, the best way to approach it is to go ahead and just swallow it down first thing in the morning. Your day will only improve after you’ve eaten the frog, and sitting around thinking about how much you don’t want to eat the frog will only make your day worse. If you’ve got a task on your to-do list that you wish you could avoid, consider Twain’s advice and just get it over with. 

Next steps

Prioritizing your work and tasks can help you become more organized, complete your essential tasks, and minimize stress and overwhelm. Many tools are available, so you can choose a technique that suits you and how you prefer to approach things. 

If you’re ready to learn more about the importance of prioritizing your work and how to become more productive, consider taking a class on Coursera to help you develop skills for your career and life. The Work Smarter, Not Harder: Time Management for Personal & Professional Productivity course offered by the University of California Irvine will help you learn task management and planning.