written by Scott Howard

In the world of Back To The Future, all you need is a DeLorean, a crazy scientist and 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity. In the real world, without a handy source of Plutonium, you’ll have to make do with improving your skills in time management.

In our modern organisations, everyone is over-allocated with more tasks than they can possibly complete.  So if you always have more things to do than time permits, how can you make it work? Simple: “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things.” Brian Tracey

In other words, you can’t possibly complete all of the tasks you have been assigned, so give up on that ‘ideal’ and just focus on the really important stuff. To figure out which tasks are the most important, you should think about consequences.  What are the positive consequences on your current job (and future career) if you complete this task quickly and well?  Or, what are the negative consequences if you fail to complete this task in a timely manner, or at all?

For example, perhaps you need to create a document which will be used to drive the next stage of the project and be seen by a large group of stakeholders.  Clearly, this is a very important task.  Or perhaps that report you are working on will be used in your manager’s board meeting on Thursday.  Again, you need to mark this as a priority or you’ll let her down.

Now that you’ve decided how important something is, you need to get organised.  This means having two lists. First, you’ll need a Master task list.  This contains every thing you need to do in your life, including the personal stuff.  You’ll want to mark the priority of the task, the deadline, who the stakeholders are, give it a reference of some kind, and capture the progress.

Secondly, you’ll need a Daily task list.  This is just a subset of the Master list.  Using the reference number or ID from the Master list, assign yourself tasks to do each day based on their importance and deadline.  Then, order it to have the most important and highest consequence task as the very first thing you do, and then the next most important, and so on.  You can do this after checking your calendar so you know how much time you will lose to meetings that day.

Rule: Always work on your most important task first thing. Repress any urge to do a simple, non-important task first, to get ‘warmed up’.  This is a terrible idea that will develop into a habit of working on easy tasks, and procrastinating on important, difficult tasks. If your most important task is a monster, like a document that will take you two weeks to complete, that’s okay.  Just chop it up into logical pieces, but still work on it for the longest possible portion of the day, and start first thing.

To maintain your lists you can use Excel spreadsheets, a smart phone app, a PC or Mac task management product, or (if you are technically inclined) you can write your own task database program.  Whatever works for you! As you complete tasks, remove them from your Daily list, thus motivating you to get that list completely empty by the end of the day.

The best time managers are the ones who complete their important tasks quickly and well, and delegate or eliminate their unimportant tasks.  This goal is completely achievable for everyone, so get to it!

Scott Howard is a Senior Business Analyst with National Australia Bank, this blog post has been reproduced with express permission.