When I designed my desk It met all of the basic needs a computer desk and shelves are intended for, a place to put my computer and some shelves to store my stuff on in a reasonably organized fashion, more organized than stacks of books and papers at least.
Since the shelves sit directly on the desk, there was little point building them first, so naturally I chose to build the basic desk first, since this would be the foundation. That was about a year ago.
Why has it taken a year before I finished my plan: A Lesson in Prioritization.
For most of my working life I worked in IT Analyst positions, Ive always had a large number of tasks, problems, issues, and projects on my plate, and one of the key functions to success in any of these types of position is prioritizing the workload to get the most important work done first.
Sounds simple, until you consider the many factors in determining what makes one item more important than another. The items I dealt with were almost exclusively other peoples problems and desires, not my own, and you can guarantee that every person you work for thinks their items are the most important, always.
When I started my home business I had a full time job, a wife and 4 kids in the house. As a family, we didn’t want the new business efforts to intrude too much into our family activities; I still wanted to spend time with my wife and kids, we still wanted everyone to have time for their own activities, sports practices, bowling leagues, and time teaching my little ones to play, and grow.
One of the main opportunities this afforded me, was solving the time issue – how do I find time to work a full time job, and still maintain all of the fun time spent with my family, and find time to start a business and make it profitable? The short answer is that I applied my prioritization skills learned at work to my home and home business life as well.
Start BIG, start with a Dream:
What is the grand plan? Everyone has dreams, but you won’t achieve them if you don’t have a plan for getting there.
For example, one of my dreams is being financially rich enough so that I can provide my family anything they need, and have lots of free time to spend with them. I want this while my youngest are still young enough so that they get to enjoy it as children (and by including this criteria, I set myself a deadline; a key factor in achieving your goals).
Make the Plan
Break your Dreams down into actionable goals. It’s these goals that can really help set your priorities.
My plan includes my home business, part of which is being built online. Part of my online strategy includes a Social Presence, a part of which is this blog. So creating, maintaining, and subsequently growing my blog gives me the foundations of a plan.
Break down the Plan into Manageable, Measurable, Tasks:
Once you have a goal, and a rough plan, you can further break things down into tasks to get the plan done. In addition to these tasks you will find things that just crop up along the way that can often derail you from your plan, but if you set your priorities right, you can keep distractions to a minimum.
Remember that a task should be measurable in some way, so make them reasonably specific, not vague or ambiguous, such as:
Measurable Task: Make 100 new Social Media connections daily, versus
Vague Task: Grow my online presence.
Larger tasks can be the basis for a plan of their own, or broken out into a number of manageable tasks.
Prioritization of the tasks:
Simply put, prioritizing is determining what needs to get done, and in what order. Getting a lot of unimportant tasks done just because they are in the plan, or on the list, or are quick to do, doesn’t help a lot if they are low priority items. What is the point in writing 100 blog posts if you don’t have a blog yet?
What factors should you consider consider?
There are a number of methods for determining which should be the top priorities, but probably the simplest is to step down the list – what is my biggest dream? On the plan to achieve that dream, what is the most important task? You probably have several – the following questions can help you decide:
- How important or urgent is the task, relative to our goals?
- Is it viable, in the circumstances; do we have resources, including time, available to get the job done?
- What are you going to achieve, or get back, from doing it?
- Consequently, what is going to be the case if you don’t do it?
- What is the impact to others of the task/goal/objective?
- Will this task move me closer to achieving my goals?
- Does this task have any prerequisite tasks? or is this task the foundation for others?
Prioritization: Why do we do it?
It helps maintain focus on what’s important relative to our goals and dreams.
To obtain the greatest benefit for the least amount of effort.
To progress forwards towards our goals
Where do those shelves fit in?
So what did building my shelves have to do with my priorities? I wanted my desk to be complete, but at the end of the day, i didn’t need it to be complete. There was a lot of far more important tasks to be done, and over winter i didn’t have anywhere to really build them.
Why did i build them now? Yesterday was a beautiful sunny warm day in Michigan, and naturally the kids wanted to play outside. They are old enough to occupy themselves, but young enough that they still need to be watched. I was able to combine watching the kids with building the shelves (and after the cutting part was done they were able to ‘help’); maximum use of my time, a task knocked off the list, and time spent with the family.
My Dream
My main dream in life is having a healthy and happy family, myself included; everything else I do revolves around making that happen.
Can you think of a better top priority? John W Robertson has several years experience as a Business Analyst and is intimately familiar with just how important systems, strategies, and support, are in solving problems in both business and personal development. Follow John’s new blog at http://GeordieAbroad.com.
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