How to prioritise tasks: Priority Pairings

The lot of the business owner means there are always 1,387 things you need to do to run and grow your business. Which in itself is not the issue: the issue is how you decide what takes priority. Sure, you can get into 139 rounds of ‘eeny meeny miny mo’ to help you choose, but there could just be a better way…

I’ve got a quick exercise that will help. Welcome to Priority Pairs (cue swooping spotlights across a retina-popping shiny floor whilst the host nimbly dances down a gold staircase and gives an over-confident wink to camera 3).

Firstly, a bit of task housekeeping. You want to have already scanned the tasks for anything that should be either:

·         Automated. What repeating tasks should not be done manually? There will be some, so get them automated.

·         Delegated. If you have a team around you (inhouse or outsourced) see what should be off your desk and onto someone else’s so you can focus on spending as much time as possible doing the thing that gives your client the most value.

·         Deleted. It’s amazing how there will always be tasks that felt important at the time, but become ‘legacy tasks’ – things that actually now don’t have value or relevance. Give yourself permission to throw them gleefully in the bin with a small whoop.

Right, now you are left with a slightly smaller mountain of tasks.

Let’s get down to some priority pairing.

1.      Write the tasks you are struggling to prioritise on separate slips of paper.

2.      Turn them all face down on the table and mix them up.

3.      On a larger piece of paper, write down your monthly or quarterly business goal. Feel free to add colour and doodles.

4.      Now pick two up.

5.      Compare these two tasks. Which needs to take priority? Which will get you closer to the business goal you wrote down? The priority task goes in a ‘now’ pile, the other task goes in a ‘later’ pile.

6.      Repeat until you have priority paired all your tasks.

7.      Then grab your ‘now’ pile and repeat the pairing process, creating a small now pile. This pile may be the right size to then tackle the tasks it holds – if not, repeat the process again.

That’s it. No complicated matrix. No ten-point evaluation grid. Only one word of warning: don’t sneeze mid-exercise, you’ll be picking tasks up off the floor for an hour, and scrabbling around on your knees under your desk should be no one’s priority.

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