Prioritize – Plan- Perform Learn How to Prioritize Tasks for Better Control Over Process Workflows

Organizations need to thrive among mounting challenges such as evolving customer demands, changing technological trends, and increasingly competitive business landscapes.

Solid planning and prioritization of process workflows are a must to thrive in challenging business landscapes. From an employee’s perspective, a typical day at work involves juggling between dozens of tasks, coordinating with team members, following up with customers, and attending to personal obligations.

Learning how to prioritize tasks is a must for both organizations and their employees for optimal productivity. In this blog, we will take you through the need for task prioritization, how to prioritize, and the best ways to prioritize tasks. 

Need for Task Prioritization

Prioritization is a powerful skill that helps businesses gain complete control over their workflows and optimize productivity. Task prioritization is no rocket science, it requires a simple logic of breaking the workload into smaller, manageable chunks and setting priorities to these chunks. When you prioritize work, the cycle of missed deadlines is broken, and last-minute rushes, and procrastinations are avoided. 

How do you prioritize your work?

The method of prioritizing work involves taking stock of every task, typically daily or weekly, and organizing them based on their importance or urgency. It should be borne in mind that urgency is not always the same as importance.

For example, attending to a client’s email might be urgent, but it may not be as important as completing all deliverables in their pipeline by the end of the quarter. Knowing the difference between urgency and importance of tasks helps in determining their priority.

Why do you need task prioritization? In teams or organizations that do not have work priorities, there is a lack of –

1. Communication

Seamless communication is among the most important, yet underrated features required for the successful execution of a project. Despite robust planning and employing the best resources on the project, without clear communication, there would be serious issues in a project. Processes are what run a project, and each process is made up of several tasks that need to have clear communication between each other. Clear communication arises from task prioritization. Once the tasks are sequenced based on priority, the project execution becomes more streamlined. 

2. Proper utilization of resources

Allocation of resources to the right task at the right time is crucial for project success. Wrong allocation or inadequate resources for tasks results in process delays or processes going off track. When does wrong or inadequate allocation occur? When the priority of tasks in the process is not established, the likelihood of top-priority tasks not receiving the required resources is greater. 

3. Productivity and performance

When tasks are not prioritized, employees tend to waste time on trivial or less relevant tasks. Without clear task prioritization, employees may switch between multiple tasks without finishing any of them. The result is decreased productivity and performance. 

4. Employee satisfaction

When tasks are not prioritized, employees can waste their time and energy on irrelevant tasks, or switch between multiple tasks without actually finishing any of them. This not only affects productivity but also leaves employees feeling overwhelmed and wasted. Working on less significant tasks may also make employees feel less valued. When employees are not clear on the task priority, their efforts are wasted on trivial tasks, and experience procrastination or burnout. 

5. Decision-making and problem-solving skills

Not prioritizing tasks that require more attention or creativity, may result in the impairment of employees’ problem-solving and decision-making skills. Their critical thinking and analytical abilities also take a beating without task prioritization, as they can struggle to prioritize based on different criteria like urgency, importance, difficulty, dependency, or duration. 

How to Prioritize Tasks?

Now coming to the part on how do you prioritize your work? Taking stock of every task, on a daily or weekly basis, and organizing them based on importance level. Categorizing each item by urgency levels is also one way of prioritizing tasks at work. Once the importance and urgency of each task are determined, the resources needed for each task can be subsequently determined. 

Here are a few tips on organizing tasks based on their importance and urgency –

• Complete urgent and important tasks immediately. For example – a client report that is due tomorrow. 
• Schedule important, but non-urgent tasks like project timeline due in a couple of weeks. 
• Delegate tasks that are urgent, but not important to the process workflow, like booking a conference room. 
• Eliminate non-urgent and unimportant tasks to address more pressing items, like preparing for a presentation later that day. 

Sometimes the sheer volume of tasks on the plate can overwhelm team members and leave them clueless as to where to begin. Lack of task prioritization might make team members lose motivation because they find it difficult to complete anything by focusing on several items at once.

You can prioritize tasks by recognizing several factors associated with a single task. By understanding the priority of each task, you can assign an order to determine how and when to accomplish each task.

Here is a simple checklist that will help you prioritize work.

Make a list

Document the current outstanding tasks. Jot down any tasks or assignments that come to your mind so you can visualize the volume of work awaiting you. 

Know the timelines

While making the list of tasks, make sure to add deadlines to each task. Setting clear deadlines allows you to separate urgent tasks from less time-sensitive items. 

Estimate the time and effort required

By understanding the resources required to complete each task, identification of the priority of a task, and planning a course of action for tackling the list becomes easy. 

Determine highest priority tasks

Priority of tasks must be based on task deadlines and estimated time to completion. The clarity on which task requires the most attention can be achieved by identifying the highest priority tasks based on urgency and importance. 

Complete highest priority tasks first

In some cases, the hardest task is the one with the highest priority. Completing your highest priority tasks over those you would prefer doing could increase your efficiency in managing priorities and time. 

Maintain flexibility

The needs of tasks keep changing – a deadline may be extended or shortened, and the scope of the assignment may change, so it is important to remain flexible so that you can adjust task priorities and tackle the to-do list very effectively. 

Review and Reevaluate tasks often

Keeping track of your tasks and deadlines is important at all times. Staying on top of your to-do list will help complete priorities and ensure that important tasks are not overlooked. Staying updated on the task priorities is also effective in removing tasks that are no longer urgent or important. 

Steps for Prioritizing Tasks

Successful execution of a project depends largely on task prioritization. Knowing what tasks can be addressed now or later will influence the success of a project. Inefficient task prioritization affects large and complex projects, with the introduction of issues like employee disengagement and absenteeism, and low productivity and performance.

How do you prioritize tasks? Here are 7 steps that guide you on how to prioritize tasks at work. 

1. List all your tasks in no specific hierarchy

To begin with, list down all your tasks both ongoing and future tasks, for all the projects. Although this may seem like an easy task, making such a comprehensive list can be challenging. You can create lists based on timelines, like daily tasks, weekly tasks, and month-plus tasks. Listing your tasks as individual items makes the workload seem less burdensome. There are several tools you can use to manage your to-do list. 

2. Determine which tasks are truly important

Not all tasks enjoy equal importance in the context of work. However, the common approach that people take towards tasks is that smaller and easier tasks will be tackled first regardless of their importance. Moreover, tackling such easy tasks gives us a false sense of progress. By distinguishing urgent tasks from important tasks, the risk of missing deadlines is mitigated. You can categorize tasks by asking the following questions –

• Who does it impact?
• What is the reward or outcome of completing this task?
• What is the risk of not completing the task? 

3. Stick to a schedule that reflects the priority of tasks

All the events and appointments are usually tracked in work calendars.

How about the tasks you need to complete?

Are they being planned according to their priority?

Does your work plan reflect the priority of the work you need to complete?

Creating and maintaining a schedule is the ultimate way to stay on track and improve work performance. A well-planned schedule helps you anticipate hectic days, and block off time for focused work. Schedule most important tasks in advance, based on priority and due dates. Sticking to a schedule helps you get things done faster and more efficiently. You can set up reminders and automate tasks so you don’t miss deadlines. 

4. Tackle the most intense, high-effort tasks first

Highest-priority tasks with tight deadlines need more effort, energy, and attention. Instead of starting the day by checking emails or social media, dive directly into the most demanding task. Tackle the task with complete focus and energy before getting to the next one. This way you can complete more challenging tasks before your energy levels dip. 

5. Focus on one task at a time

Multitasking might seem like a very profitable proposition, but in reality, trying to tick too many tasks off your schedule at the same time is a recipe for burnout. In a workplace setting, employees tend to multitask between apps, documents, emails, and interaction with team members. With everyone working at different levels of productivity, to stay focused at work it is better we tackle a single task at a time. 

6. Acknowledge what can be done realistically

When you are overstressing over a single task that isn’t important, it might create a massive mental block that forces you to stay focused on that task alone. The best thing would be to drop off a task or at least take a break until you get a fresh start/perspective. The idea here is to understand the reality that only some tasks can be done, while others cannot be carried out easily. 

7. Make task prioritization a team-wide effort

To streamline a process, you need to streamline each of the tasks that make up the process. Similarly, if you expect task prioritization at the project level, then each of the team members needs to prioritize their tasks. In the process of making prioritization a team-wide effect, you can enhance communication and collaboration across the team. A team effort towards work prioritization helps –

• Communicate issues or queries over assigned tasks or deadlines more clearly
• Collaborate and sync on scope of work, deadlines, and roles
• Deepen focus on work and eliminate interruption in work

Exploring the Prioritization and Productivity Link

With the need for prioritization firmly established, let us understand the link between task prioritization and productivity. Task prioritization brings about orderliness and streamlining to the workflow. Recognizing important and urgent tasks, and pushing them to the top of the to-do list helps in improving productivity. 

In most cases, high-priority tasks are those that have the maximum impact on business performance and return on investment. Most customer-facing processes are always prioritized over others. This way customer centricity of the business is always maintained. By prioritizing the most important or urgent tasks, employees can channel their effort and time to completing these tasks without wasting effort on trivial tasks. Completion of high-priority tasks contributes more towards productivity rather than less relevant tasks. 

10 Prioritization Techniques

We have explored the steps in task prioritization, now let us explore prioritization techniques that make task prioritization easy and effective. Similar to identifying your working style, finding the right prioritization technique is important for the success of task prioritization. We have put together 10 prioritization techniques from which you can choose the one best suited for your business. 

1. Priority Matrix

This technique consists of distributing your tasks across a 4-quadrant matrix as shown below. Each of the quadrants represents priority based on the values defined in the business. Organizing the priority matrix can be done in several ways. Some of the popular methods of arrangement include –

• Eisenhower Matrix – The Urgency is represented on the X-axis, while Importance is represented on the Y-axis. This representation forms 4 quadrants – “Important but not Urgent”, “Important and Urgent”, “Urgent but not Important”, and “Not urgent or Important”. Evaluate each task at hand and place it in the relevant quadrant. 
• Impact Effort Matrix – The X-axis represents impact and the Y-axis represents effort, to make a matrix with the following quadrants – High effort, low impact; high effort, high impact; low effort, high impact; and low effort, low impact. To distribute your tasks accordingly, evaluate how much effort each task will take and the impact completing it will have. 

2. MoSCoW Prioritization Method

This is a simple prioritization technique, where you assign every task on your to-do list to one of the 4 categories mentioned below –

• M- Must do – These are tasks that you have to do. 
• S -Should do – These are tasks that should be done but are lower in priority than M tasks. 
• C- Could do – C tasks are nice-to-dos. You would like to do these tasks, but if you don’t it is probably not a big deal. 
• W- Won’t do – W tasks are things that are not worth doing. 

It should be noted that this method is not suitable when you have a lot of tasks that need delegation. Once all the tasks have been assigned to one of the 4 categories, the tasks in the W category need to be deleted. The focus must be in the order of M tasks, followed by S tasks, and finally, C tasks if you have time. By working on your list from the top down, you can ensure that you are always working on your highest-priority tasks. But for the MoSCoW method to work, you need to ensure that all your tasks are added to the board. 

3. ABCDE method

This method was introduced by Brian Tracy in “Eat that Frog”. Similar to the MoSCoW method, this method lets you assign each task on your list into a category. 

• A tasks – the must-do tasks
• B tasks – the should do tasks
• C tasks – the nice-to-do tasks
• D tasks – the tasks that should be delegated to someone
• E tasks – the tasks that should be eliminated.

This method expands on the MoSCoW method by helping you prioritize the tasks you need to do and those that can be delegated to someone else. Kanban apps also work well for this technique. 

4. Scrum Prioritization

This is also referred to as Agile prioritization. The scrum prioritization relies on ordering tasks based on both priority and sequence. The Agile prioritization works really well when you need to consider the sequence into account. In Scrum prioritization you evaluate each task on your list based on 3 criteria –

• How important is this task?
• How important is it compared to other tasks on the list?
• Is there any other task dependent on this task?

Based on the answers to the above questions, you can assign each task a unique number from 1 to n (where n is the total number of tasks in your list). Scrum prioritization works well as a standalone method and also pairs well with other techniques like ABCDE and MoSCoW.

Any to-do list app that allows for drag-and-drop ordering works well for Scrum prioritization. But when you are arranging tasks with a lot of dependencies, project management apps like Jira and Asana provide a better way to visualize your sequenced tasks. 

5. Bubble sort method

This method compares one task with another in terms of urgency to rank its priority. This method is extremely useful when every task seems to be urgent. Begin with a horizontal grid and assign each task to a cell. Take any two adjacent tasks and compare them based on their urgency, whichever task from the previous step is more important gets moved to the left.

Continue this comparison process until you get to the end of the list. Your priorities will be listed from left to right. There is no specific tool designed for the Bubble sort method, Kanban, to-do list, or project management app for this. 

6. Most Important Task (MIT) Method

This method is an extremely simple prioritization method that is popularized by Leo Babauta. Instead of trying to prioritize the entire to-do list, start by picking one to three most important tasks that you must do every day. Pick at least one task that is related to your goals.

This way you will be doing something daily to help you reach your goals. The best feature of the MIT method is that you don’t technically even need a to-do list to use the technique. 

7. Ivy Lee Method

This method is similar to the MIT method. As per this method, at the end of your work day, you need to choose the six most important tasks on your list to work on tomorrow. Then, these 6 tasks must be arranged in terms of priority. When you get to work on the next day, work on the first task until it is complete. Tackle the rest of the tasks in the lists the same way. Continue until all 6 tasks are completed, and repeat the process every single day. 

8. 1-3-9 prioritization technique

This technique encourages you to focus on important tasks, but it also gives you a way to prioritize the less important tasks you will eventually need to work on. The 1-3-9 technique is a combination of the MoSCoW, Ivy, and MIT methods. Every day, you can plan to complete 13 tasks-

• One critical task like an M task from MoSCoW
• 3 important tasks like S from MoSCoW
• 9 nice to do tasks like C from MoSCoW

This technique can be compared with an Eisenhower matrix, leaving you with one task in the Important and urgent quadrant, three in the Important but not urgent quadrant, and nine in the Urgent but not important quadrant. 

9. Two lists technique

The 2 lists technique was introduced by Warren Buffet. First, you write down a list of 25 things you want to accomplish, once the list is complete, you need to circle the 5 most important items on that list. Once done, compile the results into two lists – one containing five circled tasks, and another containing 20 tasks you didn’t circle becomes the don’t do (yet) list. Complete attention needs to be given to completing the tasks in the first list, after which you can begin working on the second list. 

10. Pareto principle

This is also called the 80/20 rule, which states that 80% of the consequences tend to come from 20%. Putting it in another way – you could say that if you prioritize a small percentage of the right tasks, they yield outsized effects. To put the Pareto rule into practice, identify 20% work and make those tasks a priority. There is no hard and fast rule baked into the Pareto principle for how to determine your 20% work. 

Many of the prioritization methods listed above are useful for prioritizing your daily tasks. How about when you are working on a larger scale? You need software that helps identify work priorities, and automate those tasks that are repetitive and tedious in nature. 

The best way to prioritize tasks would be to choose the prioritization technique that works well for your business would be to first understand the nature of tasks. Some processes may be lopsided with several high-priority tasks, while others may have a good mix of high- and low-priority tasks. The priority matrix or the MoSCoW technique might work well for processes that have several high-priority tasks, while the 1-3-9 prioritization technique may work well when there is a mix of high- and low-priority tasks. 

Benefits of Task Prioritization

Task prioritization provides several benefits for employees and employers. Here are some of the main benefits of prioritizing tasks. 

Mitigates risk

Failure to deliver high-priority tasks on time can cost a business dearly. When important and urgent tasks are not prioritized, the business runs the risk of financial loss, loss of brand reputation, and a drop in customer loyalty. Prioritizing business tasks is a good way to channel team and individual effort toward the tasks that impact business outcomes. This way the risk of delay in task completion or loss of brand reputation is mitigated. 

Improves productivity and performance

By prioritizing the most important or urgent tasks, employees can channel all their energy and focus on completing them with quality and speed. This way, most of their attention and time is spent on high-priority tasks and not wasted on less relevant or trivial tasks. The overall productivity and performance of the team are significantly improved by prioritizing tasks. 

Reduces stress and anxiety

When tasks that have a high impact or value are prioritized, employees can avoid feeling anxious or stressed by work volume. They can plan their work day around completing high-priority tasks first and then move on to smaller and less important tasks. Task prioritization also helps employees manage their expectations and deadlines more effectively, by avoiding procrastination and burnout. 

Improves decision-making and problem-solving capabilities

When employees prioritize tasks that require more attention, creativity, and time, their decision-making and problem-solving capabilities are greatly improved. For creating the priority list or priority matrix, employees need to exercise their judgment in evaluating task importance or urgency.

To establish the importance of tasks, employees need to compare tasks based on delivery timelines, impact on customer relationships, and financial impact. This kind of evaluation and analysis improves their critical thinking capabilities and analytical abilities. 

Improves collaboration and communication

When important or urgent tasks are prioritized, the communication and collaboration channels within the organization are established clearly. Setting task priorities improves their collaboration and communication with team members, managers, and clients. Task prioritization also enables easy and effective sharing of priorities and feedback with others, and also aligns their goals and expectations. 

Streamlines business operations

Setting task priorities correctly helps streamline business processes. The task workflow is established via task prioritization, which ensures that top-priority tasks are not missed at any cost. Once the priority of tasks is established, it brings clarity to the order of execution, so that there is no distraction from pressing tasks.

Some employees may find it satisfying to start on easy-to-do tasks to derive a sense of satisfaction from completing work. This results in top-priority tasks being pushed to the end of the day. Task prioritization ensures that you are not distracted from high-priority tasks. 

Conclusion

Learning how to prioritize tasks is extremely important for employees and employers. The best way to gain clarity for everyday task execution is to set work priorities right. How do you prioritize your work? We have listed 8 steps to successful task prioritization, and given 10 effective techniques to prioritize work. You can choose from any of these techniques to prioritize your everyday tasks so that high-impact, urgent tasks are executed promptly.

A no-code workflow automation software like Cflow can help establish priorities within the workflow by creating accurate process maps. Mapping out the process helps establish priorities and the dependencies within the process. Not only does Cflow simplify process mapping, but it also helps create automated workflows within minutes with the visual form builder.

Ready to explore Cflow? Sign up for the free trial right away.