6 Best Tips to Prioritize Your Work When Everything Is Important‍

Whether you're a freelancer or working in an agency, prioritizing your tasks is one of the oldest struggles, especially if you are working remotely. With more and more tasks being added to your list, communicating through emails, sending proposals or invoices to get paid on time, it can be hard to decide which task deserves your attention.

However, learning how to prioritize your tasks can change your life, professionally and personally. Knowing how to prioritize will help you reduce stress, maintain focus, and have a good work-life balance. It can help you make the most of your time. But, this is easier said than done. Especially when each task seems important.

So, How Do You Prioritize Your Work?

In this blog, we'll share some of the best tips to prioritize your work and focus on the tasks that are more important. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an employee at any Fortune 500 company, these tips will help you evaluate and set your top priorities.

Let's start!

1] Make a List of All your Tasks

You can only prioritize your work when you know the full scope of what needs to be done in the day. So, make a list of every task that you consider getting done in a day. Right now, don’t worry about the order or the number of tasks.

To plan your day better, include your personal tasks as well. It'll help you assess the importance, urgency, and value of tasks and thus you can prioritize in a better way. You should include everything from meeting with a client to picking up your laundry.

You can even create a master list that contains everything that comes to your mind. After that, you'll have a clear idea of which tasks need your attention the most. You can then prioritize tasks by daily, weekly, and monthly goals.

2] Important v/s Urgent

The next thing you need to do is identify which tasks are urgent, that need your immediate action, and need to be completed by the end of the day. You can categorize your tasks according to their urgency & importance and then prioritize -

• Urgent and important: These tasks should be on the top and be done first
• Important but not urgent: Schedule these tasks on your calendar to get this done and block that time to get it done without interruption
• Urgent but unimportant: Delegate such tasks to someone else.
• Neither urgent nor important: Remove them from your to-do list

Delegating urgent but not important tasks to someone can be tricky but you need to find the right person for the job and explain to them exactly what you need them to do. You will need to give that person the guidance and time so that he/she can completely take over that task and complete it.

3] Automate Some Tasks

Whether you're a freelancer or an employee in an agency, there are a lot of tasks that are recurring such as maintaining data of your potential clients (leads), preparing invoices, sending proposals, and a lot of other tasks. What you can do is use software that can help you automate a few of these tasks.

For example, you can use CRM software, like Clientjoy, that'll help you manage your proposals, leads, payments, invoices all under one roof. You can even schedule your invoices and set auto-reminders so that you don't have to worry about sending invoices or reminders manually every time.

Apart from that, there are ready-to-use proposals & invoice templates that you can use so that you don't need to create from scratch for every client. You can tweak a few key points and information and your proposal will be ready to go!

4] Prioritize in your Productive Hours

One of the best ways to supercharge your productivity and complete the tasks at hand is to work on priority tasks in your productive hours. We all have a particular time that is most productive for us. For example, my most productive hours are in the morning from 8-10 am, so, I'll schedule my most important and urgent tasks at the start of the day.

One other thing you can do to supercharge your productivity is to consider the effort required to complete a task and schedule them accordingly. So, if your list looks overwhelming to you, you can schedule the tasks with minimal effort early in the day and complete them to get a sense of accomplishment. Doing this will not only lessen your workload a little but also help you stay motivated.

5] Remove Unimportant Tasks

Be reasonable & realistic. Acknowledge the fact that you won't be able to complete everything on the list. No matter how much you work efficiently, it won't matter if you are working towards the wrong goal. That is why, once you prioritize your tasks and have an estimate of how much time you will have, you should remove the extra tasks from your list.

This will not only help you be aligned with long-term goals but also allow you to focus on the priority tasks that need to be completed ASAP.

6] Review Constantly & Adapt

No matter how much you plan, prioritize and schedule your tasks, a few uncertainties are given. Your priorities can change at the last moment and you may need to re-assess. That is why you need to review constantly, adapt and be ready for the unexpected.

You need to forecast a few uncertainties to plan your day and be focused on the tasks that you have to complete. And, frequently reviewing your priorities and tasks is the key to being in control of your day and work with focus.

A Quick Summary on how to effectively prioritize your work

Proper prioritizing of your tasks can be a little more complicated than just jotting down them in a list. Here's a quick summary of the key points mentioned in the article and a few more. 😉

• Pen down everything: Write down each task, personal as well professional and make a grand list.
• Prioritize based on urgency & importance: Schedule your tasks according to their urgency of completion and importance of value to the client. Work on those tasks and delegate the remaining tasks to someone else.
• Automate some tasks: Use software or a tool to automate recurring tasks to help you focus on more important tasks.
• Complete important & urgent tasks in Productive hours: Complete your most important tasks with minimal effort in your productive hours to stay motivated and focus better.
• Discard a few tasks: There's only so much you can do in the day so remove a few tasks that are not so important or urgent.
• Avoid distractions: Steer clear of all the things that might distract you and focus on the task at hand to get it done as fast as possible.
• Set clear deadlines: Even though you are not formally bound to complete tasks within a certain time, set deadlines for yourself so that you can move on to other tasks.

Wrapping Up

The purpose of prioritization is to focus on more important tasks that matter more and will make a difference in the long run. With prioritization, you can feel more accomplished after completing the tasks.