Priority is probably one of the most important concept for a busy professional. By definition, priority represents something that’s important. It also means there’s something else that’s less important.
When you are evaluating your tasks, there’s several key points you should consider when you are thinking what your priorities are. We want to introduce a few metrics by which we might measure and compare tasks against one another:
- Benefits: How much it would improve your value metrics (money, sales, customers, etc)
- Harm: How much risks it would create given your risk metrics (money, time-delay)
- Effort: How much work it requires given your work metrics (man-hours, money, time)
Think of these as your litmus test. Given clarity in the metrics above, you can then compare your tasks and prioritize using the following rules.
- If a task is a priority, something else is inherently not a priority
- If a task is a priority, not doing it will cause more harm, or give less benefit than a task that’s lower priority
- A task is unequivocally higher priority, if given all attributes being the same, has the potential to yield higher benefits than another task
- A task is unequivocally higher priority, if given all attributes being the same, has the potential to cause less harm than another task
- A task is unequivocally higher priority, if given all attributes being the same, takes less effort than another task
So the next time you are prioritizing your tasks, consider what attributes you are comparing them. Are you looking at them from a benefit perspective, a risk perspective, or an effort perspective? It’s meaningless if you cannot clearly determine the metrics by which you compare. Even if your initial metrics are wrong (and they may change), using certain metrics initially will enable you to evaluate and keep track of how you have prioritized in the past, and that may help you prioritize in the future.
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