Build Good Habits by Learning to Prioritize

Friday, November 05, 2021

The most productive people aren’t always the busy ones. A person can have five big projects going on and still have nothing to show for it. In reality, the most productive people are the ones who consistently show progress over time.

Many people fail to make this distinction and fall into the trap of trying to do multiple things at once. As a result, they fail to get anything done or turn over second-rate work. When it comes to productivity, it’s output that matters, in work and in life.

The question is: how do we know which ones to do when everything seems important?

"What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while." ~ Gretchen Rubin

What it means to prioritize

According to Merriam-Webster, to “prioritize” is to list or rate in order of priority.

It’s easy to get lost in the barrage of tasks that demand our commitment on the daily. Even if we want to do them all, our focus, energy, and attentional resources are limited. At the end of the day, we need to pick our battles.

So in effect, to prioritize means to:

Choose a goal; and to
Eliminate all others that does not contribute to your progress towards that goal

Getting this right entails an understanding that doing so means being myopic in your approach towards this goal and sacrificing other pursuits that may compete for your time and attention.

To be clear in your direction, to know your priorities, and to protect them, is one of the traits of highly-productive people. It’s not just about getting things done but getting the right things done.

How to prioritize

The question of what to do first is not always so obvious. If you’re finding it hard to determine the value of your To-Dos, let the following methods be your guide.

Warren Buffett’s 2-List Strategy

Step 1: List down 25 things that you want to do in life. This list could include career aspirations, personal goals, and any other objectives that you want to achieve in this lifetime.

Step 2: Now encircle 5 goals from that list that you consider most important. This becomes your goals list. Any other goals that weren’t encircled goes to an “Avoid at all cost” list.

The goal of this approach is to help you identify and work towards the right goals.

Brian Tracy’s Eat the Frog Strategy

What is the ONE thing that if you can get done, will make the rest of the day a breeze? Author Brian Tracy’s strategy is simple: get the hard task out of the way at once and avoid doing anything else until it's complete.

Doing this means:

You're more likely to finish the task when you pour all your mental resources into it
You ensure that you’re doing meaningful work

"If you have to eat a live frog, it does not pay to sit and look at it for a very long time!" ~ Mark Twain

Eisenhower Matrix

Step 1: Create a list of things that you need to do

Step 2: Draw a four-quadrant box and label each quadrant as shown below.

Image via Luxafor

Step 3: Place each item on that list into the quadrant box according to the labels.

Tasks that are urgent and important need to be done immediately and therefore should be on top of your list.

Schedule tasks that are important but not urgent.

Tasks that are not important but urgent can be delegated to someone else.

And tasks that are neither urgent nor important can be dropped from your To-Do list altogether.

The takeaway

Building good habits requires doing things the right way and that includes learning how to prioritize. It may not be intuitive at first, but as you practice it every day, you can learn to look at things from a broader perspective. Find a strategy that suits you and reap the rewards.

Prioritize with TaskSpur

Automate sorting your priorities by using TaskSpur.

When you create a new task simply assign a priority level (Low, Medium, High), and the built-in digital assistant, Ari, will list down your priorities for the day in your "Focus" list.