Prioritising and Estimating Tasks

Prioritising tasks each day

I’ll touch on this again no doubt, but it’s worth thinking about exactly when you will be doing your tasks each day. Are there some things that really need to be done when you are freshest (i.e., first thing in the morning)? Is it something much more straightforward and you can sort it out at 5pm before wrapping up for the day? Not all tasks are made equal.

A handy tip is to start the day by doing your least favourite task and getting it out of the way.

Estimating tasks

Now the other big elephant in the room is how to estimate how long you will need for each task. Estimating tasks is an art in itself, and there may well be some guidance depending on your role and your industry. But for many things it is experience and judgement that are key, and it is all too easy to underestimate (or indeed, overestimate).

Often, you won’t be able to do everything in one go. Suppose you’ve estimated that drafting a report will take around 3 hours and you need to send it in on Thursday. It’s now Monday. You won’t be able to spend a full morning or afternoon on it, since you have other things to do, and various meetings in the way. You’re going to have to chunk it up and ideally distribute 3 x 1-hour chunks between Monday and Wednesday, and possibly a half-hour on Thursday to do any polishing before emailing it off. Having this all set out in your calendar helps give you the confidence that you have a plan to get it done.

Context switching

It also isn’t really possible to multitask effectively—you need to be focusing on one thing at a time. You also need time to get into the frame of mind for that task, and time to get out of it again. All that time adds up. What can seem like a really ‘simple task’, can actually end up taking three times as long when you add up all the actual time that was spent on it.

This also affects how you schedule very different tasks during your day. If you have to do four completely different things during a single morning, think carefully about how you plan them, so you don’t end up struggling.

Going overboard

Now what happens if you’ve estimated 1 hour for a task, and it turns out it’s going to take much longer. You still have a deadline, and there’s other things to do. Well, you need to prioritise. Is the next item on your calendar higher priority, or can it be shifted? Are there any meetings you can cancel or shift? You need to actively look at what you are scheduled to do next and make changes. This is really the crux of much of what we discuss here. The plan you created at the start of the week is a guideline not a law; you expect it to change. By the end of the week, your calendar schedule will likely look quite different from how it started out when you did your Monday morning planning session.

Dealing with recurring tasks

If you have tasks that you need to regularly do on a daily, weekly, or indeed monthly basis, you should add those in as recurring Outlook tasks (again, as always, assuming you’re using Outlook). Then, each day/week as relevant, you just drop the task into the calendar to book time to actually do it. When you tick off the task, the next one will be automatically created for you.

Saying no to things

OK, you might get into trouble if you start doing this, but in all seriousness, if you are often asked to do things and feel you are being overwhelmed or lumbered with things that aren’t really your responsibility, you need to find ways to politely say no.

Delegating

On a related note, if something has already made its way onto your task list, is there someone else that can do it better or quicker? Obviously, if you’re managing a team, the task might be something that’s more appropriate for one of your team members to do. But even if you’re not, you might find that a colleague might actually be glad you are being proactive in asking them for assistance rather than letting something important to them languish on your to-do list.

Using the 1-minute rule

As a guiding principle, if a task will take you less than a minute to do (some people say 2 minutes), then it’s best to just do it rather than put it onto your to-do list. This will free up your to-do list to track the more substantial tasks, rather than get clogged up with lots of small things which will inevitably be lower priority and won’t get done. Of course, if you really want to, you can always still add it in and then tick it off—yes that can be fun!