Prioritisation is a buzz word in time management.  What system should you use to prioritise your tasks?  Is it Urgent vs Important?  Is it A, B, C?  Is it High, Medium, Low?  While many of these methods sound great in theory, they often run into major practical issues.  The boundaries separating High vs Medium or A vs B can become hard to maintain.  Soon, everything becomes High or A and we are back to where we began.

What is a priority?

So let’s consider another way.  The Oxford English dictionary defines priority as…

Priority:  1 the condition of being regarded as more important. 2 a thing regarded as more important than others. 3 the right to proceed before other traffic

I think the 3^rd definition – right to proceed before others – is a great way to consider prioritizing your actions. What actions have the right to proceed before others? The first answer is whatever is time sensitive – what is due or must be done today?  That is one of the Foundations of In Time – prioritise first by your Calendar.

But what if there are several actions on your Calendar for today – which do you do first? Which one gets priority?

If there are no other inputs into this decision, then you can just flip a coin.  And that is what many people will do because there are no other ways to split actions that are otherwise equal in every respect.  So what we need is a final way to split, rank or prioritise actions.

Objectives define priorities in time management.

Here is my definition of a priority in time management…

Priority:  A task, item or next action that gets us closer to a chosen objective

If there are no goal post on the field, then it doesn’t matter which direction you kick the ball or even if you kick the ball or go find another ball.  But once there is a set of goal posts, there is a sudden objective…and all your actions will focus on those goal posts. Suddenly it comes obvious which ball to kick and in which direction.  Or which player to tackle.  Or which team member to pass to.

It’s the same in life.  Objectives (goals, dreams, targets) give focus.  They make it clear which action should come first.

When I read biographies of great people or look around me at the people who seem happy, successful or content, my observation is that few of those people get there by chance.  Almost without exception, they had objectives in life which they pursued (some vigorously, some slowly).  Very little success – monetary, spiritually, physically, emotionally – seems to occur by chance.

Objectives therefore provide a double benefit – they (a) increase your chances of achievement and (b) they provide an effective prioritisation system for time management.

Time Management Foundation:  Define objectives and keep them visible.

The problem is that many people consider objectives or goals to be “not for them”.  They are viewed as too nebulous is today’s busy world.  But consider, if you had a few objectives AND kept them very visible…how much easier would it be to look at five tasks and realise which task is really the key task among them.

We will examine how to set objectives in another article, but there is nothing stopping you from creating your own objectives right now.  More importantly, however, is that your objectives are visible.

Take a first step – nothing to lose and a lot to gain…

All you need to do is write down your objectives look at them once a week.  That’s it!  Sounds simple, yet most people keep objectives buried away and rarely look at them. Instead, just write them down – on a piece of paper, inside cover of your diary, in Outlook/Lotus Notes, your computer desktop wallpaper, on your fridge, where-ever.  Just don’t bury them away.  Looking at them daily or even just once a week will refocus you on what is important and what is not.

Ten minutes from now you could have six objectives for the next six months taped to your computer monitor and three hours from now you will discover the amazing impact this has on your time management planning.  What have you got to lose from this ten minute exercise?  Having trouble writing your objectives – we’ll deal with that problem in the next article in this series.