Prioritization is one of the easiest ways to increase your productivity and get things done!
If you can improve the way you prioritize your daily tasks and goals, you will drastically increase how successful you are in all areas of your life. Here is a brief guide and tutorial to improving your productivity through prioritization.
Step 1 – Establish Goals
One of the biggest mistakes in prioritization lies in an area that is often overlooked and undervalued. Goal-setting.
You see, you can’t rightfully set priorities without knowing what your end goals are. As an exercise, sit down and write down:
A. Where you want to be in 6 months, 1 year, and 5 years. I don’t mean physically where you want to be, but where you want to be with your career, health, relationships, etc. It is important to actually write these down and not just think about them. The act of writing them down helps to ingrain the concepts in your mind.
B. What do you value most in life? Is this good health? Having financial freedom? Being a good person? Whatever it is, write it down.
Now that you have a baseline idea of what you really want with life, it is time to move on to the next step.
Step 2 – Figure Out What Your High VALUE Tasks Are
Now that you have accurately determined goals for yourself, it is time to figure out which tasks actually bring you closer to these goals. This is a very important exercise and is one of the first steps toward effective prioritization.
Make a list of everything you do for one day. I mean EVERYTHING. For example:
I woke up, I checked email, I read a blog post, I took out the trash.
Once you have this list, examine each and every action and ask yourself: How effectively did this task get me closer to my goals? Put a star by the task if it got you closer to your goals. If it did not, do not mark the item.
Step 3 – Rank The Tasks That You Starred
Take the list you just made and pull aside only the actions that had stars by them. Now, rank the items by their importance. When I say importance, I mean how much closer they get you to your goals.
For example, one of your goals might be to get a promotion. If one of the tasks you completed was “do an extra project for work to impress the boss” than you would rank that highly because it effectively gets you closer to your goal of receiving a promotion. Something like “read a blog post” might not advance you closer, so you would probably rank this lower on the sheet.
Step 4 – Analyze The List
Now that you have created a ranking of all the activities that you do in a day, you have made a prioritization sheet. Here you can see what is really most important in helping you get closer to your goals.
You should ingrain these key PRIORITY actions into your brain and make sure that every day you are working to complete more priority actions and less low priority actions.
Moving Forward
Moving forward, try to complete this exercise on larger levels. First, instead of recording actions just for one day, try recording actions for one week.
Simply by completing this task, you will really start to see what is really valuable for you and this will cause you to subconsciously commit more to these actions. The first step TRULY IS knowing what you want and knowing how you can most effectively get to this point.
Prioritization is a cornerstone concept when it comes to success and if you aren’t concentrated on prioritizing your actions now, you should get started right away.
This was a guest post by Jason at Survey Examiner, a site known for providing real and honest reviews for paid survey panels. Stop by to see which survey panels got rated best and worst, and how you can truly make money online with paid surveys.