How to prioritise to survive when starting work

While studying for exams and completing assignments can feel very pressured, entering the world of work is a whole new ball game!

As well as getting to grips with a new job, you’ll likely need to get to know a new team of people, as well as possibly working shifts and moving to a new area. You may have lots of colleagues asking things of you too. With all of this going on, it can feel pretty overwhelming at times.

Sometimes, when you find yourself with a lot of competing demands, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. There may be times when you simply aren’t able to do everything asked of you right there and then. In these circumstances, it’s important to be able to prioritise.

What is prioritising?

Prioritising helps you to organise your tasks so that you can focus on and tackle the ones that are most important first.

It can be stressful having a lot of things to do at once. Taking some time to sort them into order of priority will give you greater clarity of thinking and relieve some of that stress. If you’re clear on which tasks need to be done before moving onto others, you’re also more likely to get them done.

There have been quite a few techniques developed over the years to help people prioritise. They all have a similar outcome, but arrive there via different routes. It might be worth trying a few of them until you find the one (or ones) that suit you best.

Here are a few to get you started…

Eisenhower matrix

The Eisenhower matrix uses x and y axes. The x-axis stands for urgency and the y-axis for importance. This matrix produces four quadrants – important but not urgent, important and urgent, urgent but not important, and not urgent or important.

Add your tasks into the relevant quadrant. By doing so you can organise your tasks more easily. When you have assigned each task to a quadrant, you will have prioritised your workload.

Important and urgent tasks are the ones you should focus on first. Important but not urgent ones can be saved for later. Urgent but not important need to be done, but do they need to be carried out by you? Is there a chance you could ask someone else to do them? And finally, urgent and not important may not even need to be completed and can be forgotten about for now.

It’s also useful to have a to-do list to go alongside this matrix. To-do lists can be paper based, or you could create one on your phone.

Creating a physical list is better than trying to keep everything in your head. Not only is there less chance of forgetting things, but you also get the satisfaction of crossing things off your list when you have completed them.

The Impact/Effort matrix works in a similar way. Plot your tasks on a matrix with impact as the x-axis and effort as the y-axis. Your quadrants will then rate your tasks as high effort and low impact, high effort and high impact, low effort and high impact, and low effort and low impact.

In this case, you would concentrate on the low effort, high impact tasks first, as this will give you quick rewards and a sense of achievement. It would be sensible to tackle the high effort, high impact tasks next and leave the two lower impact tasks completely alone or tackle them when you have more time.

MoSCoW method

The MoSCoW method of prioritisation is an acronym that stands for Must have, Should have, Could have and Won’t have. It’s often used in project management, but can work well in other settings too.

As with the other methods already mentioned, assign your tasks to one of the categories above. Your Must haves are your top priorities. Should haves should come next. Could haves are less important, and the Won’t haves can be left alone.

Most Important Task (MIT) method

This is a technique popularised by the author Leo Babauta, the founder of Zen habits, and it’s quite simple.

Pick three tasks that you must do that day. He suggests that while two of them can be work tasks, at least one of them should be about your wider life goals. The other important thing is that these Most Important Tasks should be worked on in the morning. This is to ensure they get done before other things distract you from them.

It sounds a bit restrictive, but you will find that you get a lot more than three things done that day!

The Ivy Lee method

The Ivy Lee method has been in use since the early 20th century. Its principles are easy to grasp and are as follows.

At the end of each working day, write down your six priorities for the next day and order them according to their importance. When you start work the next day, begin by working on the first priority and don’t move onto the next one until you’ve completed it. Continue with the rest of the list in the same way.

If you have any tasks on the list uncompleted at the end of the day, move them onto your list for the next day and repeat this process every working day.

The benefit of this method is that it concentrates your mind on a single important task. We’re expected to multi-task these days, but studies are showing that when we try to do this, we’re more prone to making mistakes.

By writing down your six priorities, you have made the tough decisions as to what is important and you can devote your attention solely to those things.

Pareto analysis

You may have come across the Pareto Principle already, which says that roughly 80% of the effects of something come from 20% of the causes. To put this into the context of prioritising, you could identify the top 20% of tasks that will bring you 80% of outcomes.

This method may not be as quick and easy as some of the others already mentioned, but it could still be worth a try.

This is just a flavour of some of the prioritising techniques you could check out. A quick online search will yield more if these aren’t to your liking.

The main aim of prioritising is to help you regain control of your situation so that you feel better able to tackle what you need to do. Whether that’s your workload or your personal life, having a clear view of what you need to do and when can help you to feel less stressed and more on top of things. Happy prioritising!