Six Steps to Effectively Prioritize Your Time
by Mike Brassil

One key to becoming more productive is to manage your time wisely. This way, those important projects and tasks will not "fall through the cracks." Additionally, you will find that some tasks do not really need to be completed at all!
First, prioritize your activities in the order of their importance. Time spent on routine or trivial tasks takes time away from income-generation. Ask yourself what absolutely must be accomplished today and write these tasks down. Unless you commit them to paper, these objectives are only wishes. Following a prioritized schedule on a daily basis will have a direct bearing on your overall performance. The six steps to effectively prioritizing your time are:

1. Make a critical assessment of how you spend your time. List your activities and evaluate them in terms of their importance.

2. Prepare a list of twenty tasks you want to accomplish for the day, and number them according to their degree of importance. Focus on one item at a time and, as you accomplish each task, scratch it from the list. At the end of the day, you will probably have several tasks that you were unable to accomplish. That’s OK. The next morning, they will be the first items to add to your new list for the day.

3. Be sure each activity is essential. Ask yourself if a given task really needs to be undertaken. If the answer is that you don’t really need to do it, you’ve saved a lot of time - and guilt. Simply take the task off your list.

4. Can the activity be systematized? By creating a step by step procedure, can you make it more efficient?

5. Do you have someone you can delegate assignments to?

6. Can you out-source some, or all, of the assignments?

Follow these suggestions for prioritizing your time and you will soon find yourself completing more in less time.
 

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