Finding Time by Spotting Your Top Priorities

The Time Finder with Paula Eder

The way you use your time is the way you live your life.

Finding Time by Spotting Your Top Priorities

Posted on August 19, 2008, under Time Priorities.

Finding time by prioritizing is a powerful time management tool. Once you’ve compiled your list of tasks, it’s time to place them in order of priority.

First look at your list of ongoing tasks and decide which are the most important.
An ongoing task might be a budget report that you need to turn in to your boss by the third Tuesday of each month. It suggests high priority because it deals with money.

Look closer …
If this task can be accomplished by simply integrating daily financial records, it probably doesn’t take very long to do. While important, it wouldn’t be your highest monthly priority. However, if your report requires integrating information from your team of six people …and you don’t receive their reports until the day before your report is due … this task becomes “time-limited” and therefore a high priority.

Look for dependencies …
When you’re dependent on something from other people to complete your task, its level of difficulty increases. This is simply because the variables increase. The more dependencies involved in a task, the more it becomes a priority.

By working on your priorities this way, you create a system that assures that the highest priorities or responsibilities get addressed first.

Try this for yourself, and let me know how it goes.

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