Prioritizing

After someone has listed all their goals and before they start creating their action plans, there is a critical activity – prioritizing.

Prioritization consists of two stages:

• sorting
• assigning importance.

Sorting involves looking at all the things you want and deciding if they are really important, quite important or would be nice to have, but don’t really matter that much. This is the first part of the process. What you will end up with is a list of really important things – an ‘A’ list – and two lists of less important things – ‘B’ and ‘C’.

Assigning importance requires you to decide what is top of your ‘A’ list, and what is next, until you’ve got it in some sort of order. A tip on how to do this is to write each goal on a sticky note and stick one up on a blank board or piece of wall. Take the next one that comes to hand and decide if it is more or less important than the first, then place it either above or below it. Continue this with each goal – is it more or less important than the current top of the list goal? Work down the list checking it against each one until you find out where it slots in. This should produce a working order without too much confusion.

This is the sort of thing that good time managers do with their daily ‘to do’ lists. The secret of getting the important jobs done first is to persuade your staff to do this with their work goals as well as their personal goals.