Last week, I wrote about how to handle an oppressively long task list. If you haven’t read that entry, you might want to because I’m going to presuppose you have for this article. As we walked through the process of biting your list into smaller chunks to chew through it, there was an underlying assumption that your list was organized and in the “correct” order.
This guy is so productive he has a whole wall for three tasks. All of which are empty.
And one is checked off.
The assumption I made is that your task list is prioritized correctly. What I mean to say is that if you don’t have the most important work at the top of the list, you may find yourself wasting precious hours on work that almost no one cares about. This is a career trap that I genuinely hope you can avoid as often as possible. I’m pretty convinced that a larger percentage than we would like to admit of the work that we do on a day-to-day basis isn’t adding considerable value, and if you can’t recognize it you may end up spending years moving rocks around when instead you could have built a bulldozer.
The real trick to being successful is to focus your time on work that has an impact and adds clear value to your organization. If you’re a vSphere admin and you spend all your time combing through VMs looking for snapshots, you’re adding a trivial amount of value to the organization. But if you instead spend time collaborating with the network team to harden the environment against security issues, ensure that your clusters are all within policy by setting up host profiles, or spend time connecting with business stakeholders to make sure that their apps are performing properly – that might be more valuable to the business that employs you.
Here’s the real secret – the folks that can do this well and do work that matters more often than they do “busywork” tend to get promoted. They’re the ones that seem to move up or go somewhere else. The reason is simple: they do work that gets noticed and appreciated more. Unfortunately, in talking to lots of people in IT it seems that many to most managers are doing a poor job of articulating what work is more important and setting priorities for everyone on their team.
So in an effort to try to help out, I’d like to spend just a little bit of time here, helping you put a rudimentary system in place to help you prioritize what work you should put at the top of your list and what should go to the bottom – or just fall of it completely.
Let’s start with this: I am assuming that you do not have enough time to complete everything on your list. Truthfully, if you can complete everything that you could possibly be doing, you may not be reaching far enough – or you may not be looking hard enough for projects or tasks that should be taken care of and are being neglected. I worked in catering for a while and anyone who was “all caught up” was immediately conscripted into washing something – anything – because the kitchens were never clean enough. So my first tip is this: if you have free time in the office, then seek out additional work. You can ask your boss, your teammates, or find some yourself. Often, some of these side projects return immense value and become something big.
Quick sidebar: Does anyone use a pocket-watch anymore? Do they make a “smart” pocket-watch?
They do! It’s called an iPhone… or if you like suffering, an Android.
Okay - let’s assume that you have plenty on your task list to keep you busy, you just don’t know how to figure out what’s most important. First, make sure you know the difference between “urgent” and “important.” Do you have any deadlines looming? I like to estimate how much time each thing on my task list will take and compare that to when it is due. Here’s an example: If I have something that will take me four hours and it needs to be completed by the end of the day and it is 1:00 in the afternoon, I need to start that right now. On the other hand, if I have something that will take three days and is due at the end of the month and it’s only the first week - I have some buffer space. So, estimate how much time your task will take and then try to slot it in when you can before the due date. You have now figured out the “urgency” piece; it’s all about when it’s due and how much time you need to get it done. This leads us to my second tip: know how much time each thing on your list is going to consume so you can plan for it.
As for importance, think about each task and how much impact it will have. Is anything going to be different if you do or do not do it? Will it make a difference in three weeks? Months? Years? The more yeses you get to those questions, the more important it is. Also, as a pro tip: give a project that was given to you with any skip-level managers on CC extra weight. If your boss’ boss asks you do to something, it’s important whether you think it is or not. This is the essence behind my third tip: make sure you think about how important work is before you spend time doing it.
Okay, so now you know roughly how important something is and how urgent it is. The key is to make sure that you’re spending as much time as possible on the most important stuff, and trying to find quick ways to complete urgent but less important work. The name of the game for mildly-to-not-at-all important work is efficiency. You don’t need to give it your best – reserve the intense focus for the super important work.
What you should have now is a roughly two-dimensional picture of work with relative importance and urgency. You can divide time up into the four quadrants of:
Important and urgent
Important but not urgent
Not important but urgent
Not important and not urgent
And just like that, you have an order in which to do things!
Today on “pictures I stole from the internet,” we have this beauty!
(If this is yours, let me know and I’ll give you credit. I’ve had this in my file for a long time…)
Is this oversimplified? Of course it is! This is a blog post, not a three-day workshop on time management and prioritization. But here’s the thing: If you are like the vast majority of people I know in IT, you aren’t doing any prioritization at all - so this is infinitely better than whatever you’re doing now.
At the end of the day, the most important and urgent task you may have is to start prioritizing the rest of your task list. After all, if you don’t do that, you’ll never find space for the rest of the important stuff in your day.
On to you:
Are you using a prioritization system? If not, will you try this simple one out?
What tasks are you doing that are neither important nor urgent? What can you do to minimize the amount of time on these?
What’s the most important thing on your task list? Does being most important give it a higher urgency? Likewise, what’s the most urgent thing on your task list? Is it important?