Prioritizing Your Focus to Maximize Value

By Alyssa Fox | Senior Member

We all want to be productive. But what is it that you’re producing? Is your output meaningful and important, or is busy work taking over your day? In a time where everyone is doing more with less, how do you juggle all of the tasks thrown at you from a million different directions?

When starting to prioritize your own work, think about the larger context. What are your boss’s priorities? Your team priorities? Your company priorities? You need to prioritize your work in a way that lines up your tasks with the bigger picture. The value of your work is directly related to how well it lines up with your organization’s priorities, so it’s imperative that you prioritize your work well—not only for your sanity’s sake, but your career’s as well.

Applying the Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle states that 20% of your activities provide 80% of the value. Unfortunately, most of us get caught up in working on the other 80% of tasks, fighting daily fires and responding to urgent requests rather than important ones. So how do we move from focusing on those activities that don’t provide much value to focusing on fewer activities that provide more bang for our buck? We need to apply the Pareto Principle to ensure we are spending time on the things that give us the most value, our company the most value, and our customers the most value.

Most professionals rarely have more than two to three hours a day to focus without interruption. Your focus and your time are valuable when you are at work, so you need to protect them by using them well. You might have heard before of the jar illustration when discussing priorities. If you are given a jar, along with rocks, pebbles, sand, and water, how do you fill up that jar? Do you put the rocks in first? The water? How do you fit the most of those items into the jar? Ideally, you would start with the rocks first, since they are the largest. Put as many of those in your jar as you can. Then add pebbles to fill in the space between the rocks. Sand is even smaller and more porous so it can slide between rocks and pebbles. Finally, fill the remaining space in the jar with the water.

In terms of prioritization, the rocks are your highest-priority items. There are relatively few of them, but they take a lot of time, energy, and concentration. In return, they deliver the greatest possible results. For example, you might submit a proposal to executives to restructure your team or develop a list of requirements for a new product. The pebbles are important activities that support the rocks and help you get the results you want. These take less room in the jar, but you need more of them to get the rock items done. Examples of pebbles might include communication with your team for their ideas on that proposal or market research to see what competitors your new product might have. Sand is the fun stuff—the things you like to do and make your daily work life enjoyable. Tasks like helping coworkers, checking industry blogs, and planning the company party might be relevant, but they require little effort and don’t return high-value results. Finally, water is the clutter in your life—things that people perceive as “must do,” but bring little results or satisfaction. Water items can easily take up all your time because they are never-ending—filing, checking email, and attending unimportant meetings. These items are generally the 80% of your activities that bring 20% or less of the value of what you do.

Separating the Urgent from the Important

Most of us fall into the trap of working on urgent things so much that we neglect the important things. It’s easy to get caught up in the myriad requests we have from others throughout the day, and before we know it, another work day has ended and we have made no progress on our important projects.

As Walt Disney once said, “Everyone needs deadlines.” People tend to work on tasks that have a deadline first. If your important work is not deadline-driven, consider breaking it down into tasks and assigning deadlines to those.

The following grid helps us determine where the focus of our work is going and see where we might re-prioritize some items.

To assess your current focus, complete the following steps:

1. List all the activities and projects that you feel you have to do. Try to include everything that takes time at work, however unimportant.
2. On a scale of 1-5, assign importance to each of the activities. Judge importance by how well that item helps you meet your goals and objectives.
3. Evaluate each activity’s urgency using the 1-5 scale.
4. Plot each item on the grid according to the importance and urgency values you gave it.
5. Study the grid to determine where you might need to shift focus to ensure you are spending more time on your important work.
6. Use the strategies for different quadrants of the grid defined below to help you rework and schedule your work according to your set priorities.

Urgent and Important Tasks

As the grid defines this quadrant, the items here are critical activities. Some of the urgent and important tasks you can foresee, and others you can’t. Obviously, planning ahead helps reduce the number of last-minute items. Ensure you leave some time in your schedule for unexpected issues or crises that might arise.

Urgent and Not Important Tasks

These tasks are the “firefighting” tasks that keep you from doing your work and achieving your goals. Consider rescheduling, delegating, or eliminating these tasks.

Not Urgent but Important Tasks

These tasks help you achieve your personal and professional goals, and should be where you spend most of your time. Set aside sufficient time to work on these tasks so you have time to do them properly, avoiding procrastination so these tasks do not turn into urgent ones.

Not Urgent and Not Important Tasks

These items are distractions and you should avoid them wherever possible. Some of these might be things others want you to do, but they do not contribute to your own goals.

Determining the Big Picture and Future Impact

Keeping the big picture in mind throughout your prioritization process is necessary to ensure you are heading down the right path. You must continually reassess how your work fits into the overall goals of your organization, and adjust and readjust accordingly.

Another way to determine what should be your highest-priority tasks are to define the future impact of that task. What will completing that task gain you in a week? A month? A year? Five years? If you see no or low future impact for a task, it is likely something to remove from your plate.

To help yourself think about the big picture, you can ask the following questions:

• Why am I here?
• What should I be accomplishing?
• What is my major goal or objective right now?
• What results am I hoping to get from this?

To help yourself determine the future impact of a task, you can ask these questions:

• Does this task contribute to my most important goals?
• How will this task impact my work for the next few months? Few years?

Eliminating and Delegating Work

High-priority work should always come before low-priority work. If you cannot complete all of your high-priority work, you must eliminate or delegate some of the work on your plate. You can’t indefinitely continue to take on new responsibilities without getting rid of others.

If you did the grid exercise, you likely had tasks in the Not Urgent and Not Important category. You can simply ignore or cancel some of these. Others might require you to politely tell someone no if you can. Be aggressive with removing these distractions from your task list. If something ends up being more important, it will come back up later and you can re-prioritize it at that time.

When delegating work to others, ensure the person to whom you’re delegating has the ability to do a great job on that task. Then delegate the result. The process is none of your business. In other words, tell them what you want the outcome to be, then step back and let them arrive at that outcome in their own way. This type of delegation removes the minutiae of the process from your task list, gives authority to the person to complete the job, and helps them make their own decisions.

Learning to Say No

When removing low-priority tasks from your workload, learning to say no is a valuable skill. At times, it is appropriate to tell others no politely, if the task they are asking you to do does not contribute to your high-priority goals. You can also encourage them to solve the problem themselves and help them get started.

If the task is important, sometimes you might need to say no for now, but can take on the task later. If that’s the case, schedule some time to talk with them when you are available. Scheduling a future appointment will keep them from distracting you now, and free up your time for working on higher-priority items now for longer without interruption.

On a short-staffed team, it’s often difficult to take on additional tasks without something else being affected. In this case, providing alternative options is a good way to say no without saying no. For example, try one of the following:

• “I can do that, but this other project will be delayed.”
• “I can do that, but we will have to cut scope to make that date.”
• “I can do that, but it will take more time.”

Maintaining Productivity

Working productively on our high-priority tasks should be repeatable and maintained. We must be vigilant to not let the urgent take over the important, and every so often revisit our task list and re-prioritize those tasks.

Our natural tendency is to do the easiest things first. Resist that impulse and focus on the things that are important. Set aside time to work on those important things, and let the little things go—through elimination or delegation.

When you receive an unplanned item to add to your task list, evaluate its importance and urgency using the grid method. Then add the item to your list in the appropriate place based on its resulting priority, rather than letting it jump ahead of the items you have already planned.

Prioritizing your tasks frequently is the key to good time management. Taking action on your high-priority tasks ensures you meet your professional goals. And meeting your professional goals helps your projects to move smoothly, your stress to be soothed, and your work to make a real difference.

Further Reading

Achieve Goal Setting Success. “Setting Priorities.” Accessed 15 July 2013. www.achieve-goal-setting-success.com/set-priorities.html.

Drawas, Orna W. Perform Like a Rock Star and Still Have Time for Lunch. Research Triangle Park: ROI Marketing, 2010.

Evan Carmichael.com. “Seven Simple Ways to Prioritize.” Accessed 15 July 2013. www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/402/Seven-Simple-Ways-To-Prioritize.html.

MindTools Toolkit. “The Urgent/Important Matrix.” Accessed 15 July 2013. http://mindtools.com/pages/article/newHTE_91.htm.

Tracy, Brian. Time Power: A Proven System for Getting More Done in Less Time Than You Ever Thought Possible. New York: AMACOM, 2004.

Alyssa Fox is director of information development and program management at NetIQ Corporation in Houston, Texas. Her interests and skills include technical communication, user experience, process improvement, project management, and agile development practices. Alyssa is a member of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA), a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication (STC), and is currently serving as STC Secretary. Find Alyssa on Twitter @afox98.