grishmaFinding a way to balance your studies, work, and social life can almost seem like an impossible task to do. There never seems to be enough time in the day to get everything done, and the prospect of completing everything on your to-do list can be mind-boggling. The most effective way to ensure that the tasks on your to-do list are completed is through managing and ruthlessly prioritizing them in an organized way. Ruthlessly prioritizing your tasks means deciding not to do the things you really want to and instead focusing on the tasks that are important and need to get done immediately. By following these few tips and techniques mentioned below would help assist you to manage and prioritize your tasks in an ordered way.
1. LISTING TASKS ROUGHLY
If you’re not sure where/how to begin organizing your tasks, start by writing them down on a book or wherever you want. This would help set the base for you to later categorize and sort each task in an organized manner.
2. CHOOSE AN ORGANIZATION TOOL
Search and pick on an organization tool that you feel most suitable to use for your to-do list. These tools can be anything such as a to-do list app, a notebook, or even your phone’s memo app. It doesn’t matter where you keep your list as long as it contains all of the tasks you must complete. These tools will help you stay organized and have a clear view of your day-to-day routine.
3. CATEGORIZING & ORGANIZING TASKS
Once you’ve made a list of all of your tasks, start by analyzing and planning how to sort and organize them. At this stage, you go through your list, analyze each task and decide how you want to categorize the tasks. There can be several ways to organize your tasks and here is an example:
a) PRIORITY MATRIX
This is Stephen Covey’s time management matrix that lets you organize tasks that are of top priority. This consists of 4 different quadrants that help you prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance.
Important and Urgent: Complete these chores/duties as soon as possible.
Important but not Urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and make a schedule for it.
Urgent but not Important: Delegate these responsibilities to someone else.
Neither urgent nor Important: Remove these from your calendar as soon as possible
You can try any method you like and find it comfortable as long as you have everything organized and
have a clear view of what to do.
4. SET ROUGH DEADLINES
Now that you have organized and prioritized your tasks, set rough deadlines for the tasks that are small and try finishing them on time. This would help in making you feel organized and feel content with yourself. Rewarding yourself after achieving your goals and deadlines is a good way to motivate yourself to finish tasks.
5. REWARD YOURSELF
At the completion of your tasks, reward yourself with a little something that you’d like to do or have. This will provide a sense of relief and motivation to complete your tasks on time. Sometimes rewarding yourself at the end of each task can drive you to do your tasks on time and not leave it for later.
A good day is guaranteed when you prioritize your work properly.
It’s an amazing feeling to get to the end of the day and realize you’ve completed some important work. However, this is not always possible.
Tasks take longer to complete than expected, interruptions occur and our days are filled with meetings and conversations. So, while knowing how to prioritize your important tasks is important, you should also be realistic about how much you can actually accomplish.
This way, you’ll end the day feeling good about the progress you’ve made and ready to take a well-deserved break.
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