Prioritize Tasks So You Do First Things First

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash

There are many productivity systems out there and an endless array of books, websites, and tutorials on how to use them. And for the most part, they all work as long as you work them. Most, if not all, are built on the principles of prioritizing your tasks so that at any time, you are doing the next right thing.

I am a big proponent of these systems and have written my own articles covering how I implement my version of these systems. You can link to a couple at the end of this article.

But today, I don’t want to talk about what order you do things in, but when you do them. That may sound like the same thing but bear with me. I have used this system successfully for the last twenty years or so, and I can guarantee it will make your day easier and more productive.

Don’t get me wrong. I still prioritize my tasks based on the principles you will find in any productivity system, including my own. But I not only deal with the order I will tackle my tasks, but when I will address them.

I never really thought about formalizing this technique until a conversation I had with a coworker a couple of jobs back. I asked her if she wanted to go to lunch with me. She replied that she couldn’t because she had too many things that had to get done today. I replied, “You know when I did the things that had to be done today? Yesterday.”

And while that wasn’t entirely true, it was based on how I had been scheduling my tasks for some time without really thinking about it. It just came as a natural progression of my task management system and how I set priorities. But yeah, if a task or project is due tomorrow, then today it has the highest priority. If you can’t go to lunch because you let a project go until the due date, you probably miss a lot of lunches.

But here’s how I schedule my day once my day’s general priorities are set. I divide my day into four general periods:

• Before breakfast
• Before lunch
• Afternoon
• Evening

Depending on the system I am using, these may be priority levels, some jury-rigged field, or in the case of ClickUp, a custom field. In that way, they are sortable, just like my priorities. And since they are a higher level of sorting, I can have high, medium, and low priorities within each category. In other words, a low priority before breakfast task will get done before a high priority afternoon task.

This probably goes against everything you have ever read regarding prioritizing tasks, and it certainly falls outside of GTD guidelines, but bear with me. It allows me to determine not only the priority but the time period I want to accomplish it in. If it helps, you can think of it as a sort of a modified Eisenhower Matrix. As you may know, the Eisenhower Matrix divides each task into four quadrants:

• Important and Urgent
• Important but Not Urgent
• Urgent but Not Important
• Not Urgent or Important

My categories are based on the same principles. The first category contains everything I want to get done first thing in the morning. Some of these are important and urgent, but some are things I just want out of the way first. Checking overnight sales and updating financial accounts fall into this category. Most things in this section could be done anytime, but I want to get them done early and then forget about them for the day.

The second category is what allows me the flexibility to do that. Everything important or urgent goes here. I want everything that still has to be done today finished before lunch. For the most part, tasks involving projects due today were done yesterday, and I’ll get back to those in a minute. This is mostly daily tasks, things I do every day, or weekly tasks that fall into today. Writing the first draft of this article was in that category. Proofreading the article I wrote yesterday goes here. Daily chores are all done before lunch. If I have time, some of these may be done in the before breakfast timeframe.

This gives me the luxury of not worrying about the rest of the day. I can take a leisurely lunch, knowing that I’m still good if I don’t do anything else today. That is a very liberating feeling. You may think it’s not possible, but it is. You may have to work up to this. Slowly carving through your to-do list until you have a manageable load. If the things you absolutely have to do today are more than can get done in the morning, you have a project management problem elsewhere that needs attention.

I should probably point out that before breakfast is between 5 am, and 8 am, and before lunch runs from 8:30 to 11:30.

The afternoon is used to look to the future. Get a head start on things due tomorrow or the next day. The more you can get done here, the easier those first two periods become. This is also where all the nice to do, but not critical tasks fall. Maybe some not important and not urgent things will get done in this period, although most of those wait until the evening.

If you are still working, I urge you to save the evening time slot strictly for home and family. Taking work home will not help your job and will certainly not help your family. I’ve never known anyone who takes work home every day ever to get caught up.

But I’m retired, whatever that means, and I run all of my business from home. I still reserve the evenings to spend with my bride, but a lot of work is reserved for my laptop while watching TV. A lot of my photography processing is done then. I also catch up on emails and forums. All low-level, non-critical tasks. At some point in this period, I will take a close look at tomorrow and a quick look at the rest of the week.

There is my system. Take a look at yours and see if you can apply it to your daily tasks. Getting things done early before you have any interruptions is very helpful. But more important is that second period.

Get everything critical to today’s success done before lunch, and the rest of your day will be much better.

So, let’s grab a bite, shall we?

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