Prioritizing your tasks
helps ensure that you get urgent tasks done and
still go home at 5:00. Remember, you have
things you need to do that might get you in
trouble if you don't do them, and things that you
want to do that aren't super urgent and that won't cause any issues if
you don't do them. Suppose you arrive at
work in the morning with the following things
on your to-do list. First, you need to submit a draft marketing plan
to your boss for review. It's due at two 2:00
PM and requires a review of some meeting notes and market research reports. Draft plans usually take
about two hours to write. Next, you have to
give an update at a 9:00 AM product launch meeting. You need four or five
bullet points based on a phone conversation you had yesterday with the
product manager. After that, there are six or seven resumes for an open staff position
that you need to review, you hope to begin interviewing
candidates next week. Then there's e-mail.
Six messages came in yesterday requesting updates on various marketing projects. For each one, it
will probably take about 15 minutes to dig out notes and write
the responses. Finally, there's that
year end marketing report which your boss wants
by Friday of next week. You're struggling with it. The last time you sat
down to work on it, you had a bad case
of writer's block. How would you prioritize these? The first thing on your calendar is the product launch meeting. You'll have about an
hour to prepare for it, so that's your top priority
as you start your day. This is in the need category, because if you don't do it, you might be embarrassed if you can't answer any questions. After the meeting,
you'll have somewhere between three and four hours to write the draft
marketing plan, so you better do that next. You never know, might take
longer than two hours. This is also a need item, since you don't want to get
in trouble with your boss. After that, do the emails, since it's a good practice to respond within a business day. Everything else is not urgent and won't be problematic if it spills over to tomorrow and you'll
get to go home on time.