By: Whitney Owen, PMP, Executive Director, University Business Consulting
“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” – Stephen Covey
Prioritizing tasks is crucial for effective stress management. Prioritization allows us to focus our time and energy on our most important and urgent tasks first, ensuring that we meet important deadlines and achieve essential goals. We can easily feel overwhelmed by a seemingly endless to-do list, but prioritizing our tasks gives us a sense of control over our work. This proactive approach not only enhances our productivity but also benefits our well-being through stress relief. Here’s how to manage stress well through prioritization.
The start of another academic year brings excitement and new possibilities. However, it can quickly transition into a schedule overload of classes, assignments, extra-curricular activities, social engagements, job requirements, time for self-care, and more. It’s easy for any of us to look at what we must accomplish in a day, week, month, or semester and think, “There’s no way I can get it all done.” Once that mindset sets in, other negative thoughts can creep in that prevent us from moving forward, such as, “I don’t even know where to begin,” or “Why should I even bother?”
That was the predicament one of my leadership coaching clients had last year. She was very talented and ambitious and had taken on a lot of responsibilities in school, work, and her personal life. As a result, she found herself feeling overwhelmed and lacking the confidence to believe she could accomplish all she set out to do. Through our work together of learning how to assess what items on her to-do list were the most important and needed immediate attention, she was able to start feeling less overwhelmed. Instead, she began to really focus on the few tasks she needed to address in the coming days or weeks. We worked on her prioritization plan.
The Well-Being Benefits of Prioritization
Effective prioritization helps you know with clarity what items you can mark off your to-do list first, so you can feel a sense of accomplishment and continue with forward momentum to tackle the larger, overall goal.
There are many well-being benefits of prioritizing tasks, including less stress, more productivity, time to check your work quality, time to relax, help to overcome procrastination, and more motivation. Other benefits of effective prioritization include improved decision-making and better focus and concentration.
How to Prioritize Your Tasks Well
So, how do you prioritize effectively? Any prioritization technique starts with creating a comprehensive list of all your to-do tasks. You can make the list any way that works for you: written in a notebook, typed in an Excel worksheet, using a Trello board, etc. You should strive to do a brain dump of everything you need to accomplish during a certain time period (such as this month) or to achieve a specific goal (such as to complete a group project). Next, choose a prioritization technique that works for you.
One of the most widely cited and effective tools for prioritization is the Eisenhower matrix. This method was named for former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who made decisions based on their urgency and importance.
By sorting your to-do items into these four quadrants, you can quickly see which items are your most important and urgent (top left quadrant). These are the tasks you should tackle first, while important tasks that are not as time-sensitive (top right quadrant) should be scheduled on your calendar for a later date. Urgent tasks that are not as important (bottom left quadrant) are prime examples of tasks you should see if someone else can handle for you, such as following up with a lead or researching part of a project. In my opinion, the bottom right quadrant is the most important to make sure you do not overlook – which of your tasks can you eliminate from the list altogether? These are the items that you think you have to do, but on a second reflection, they are really irrelevant to your goal or are distracting you from achieving the end game. Try and eliminate as many tasks as you can that keep you from getting to where you want to be.
Another of my favorite prioritization techniques is the MoSCoW method. This is a method that originated from the software development industry, but it is also effective for individual task prioritization. You assign your to-do list tasks into one of the four following categories:
- Must Do: M tasks must be done/accomplished
- Should Do: S tasks should be done, but are lower priority than M tasks
- Could Do: C tasks are “nice to haves” you could get to, but your project won’t fail without them
- Won’t Do: W tasks (much like the bottom right Eisenhower quadrant) are items you will delete
This approach is great for those who like to organize lists into different columns or categories. However, it does not get as directly to the timing of when to complete the tasks, aside from showing you which tasks you put into the “M” category to be tackled first.
A final prioritization tip is to learn the art of saying “no.” Often, we find ourselves with too many items on our to-do list in the first place, because we have said “yes” to more things than we humanly have the time or energy to commit to doing. I used to be a chronic over-subscriber, meaning I would commit myself to too many activities, leadership roles, and organizations than I could possibly do without exhausting myself. As I got older, I decided that unless I was willing to give 100 percent of myself to what was being asked of me, my answer would be “no.” This self-imposed rule has helped me avoid saying “yes” to opportunities that sound nice, but that I’m not truly interested in, or situations where I don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings by turning them down. These are tasks or roles where I know in my gut I will not really have the time or commitment to give my all. Try saying “no” yourself, and see if it can free up some time for you.
Once you have prioritized your list and are ready to tackle your “M” or urgent/important tasks, try the time-blocking approach. This method actually puts visible time blocks on your calendar where you devote time to working on those prioritized tasks, building focused time into your schedule to get them done.
Whatever prioritization method(s) you choose, it can help you navigate through and overcome the feeling of being overwhelmed by all the tasks weighing you down. Remember, priority #1 is to start making your list!
Additional Resources
- The Zapier.com blog “How to Prioritize Tasks When Everything Feels Important”
- The LifeHack.org article “How to Deal with Competing Priorities Effectively”
- The MindTools.com article “Prioritization”
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