Sometimes it’s hard to determine how important a task is. For example, how important is it that I answer my phone just now? It all depends on who’s calling. It also depends on what I am doing at the time of the call. Am I driving? I shouldn’t answer. Am I sitting in a chair drinking tea? Maybe I should answer. What if it is a business call and I am sitting with a friend? What if it is a friend calling and I am at work? There are so many variables!
Common sense strongly insinuates that the most important thing should be a matter of urgency and importance, meaning that it should be regarded as time sensitive while also holding highest value. Why is it so hard to wrap my mind around this obviousness? I think sometimes common sense whispers indistinctly beneath the uproar of my thoughts, or maybe I don’t sit still long enough to hear the advice.
I have always juggled responsibilities according to some kind of task-rating system, but I must admit the system(s) existed solely on whim and mood, and shifted unpredictably over time. In the past, I would constantly make lists of things to accomplish and would try to place them in order, according to importance. I would identify what I considered to be the most pressing thing and would write it down (in pencil) at the top of my graph paper, followed by consistently less crucial items. However, I had no way to weigh the value of my action items.
Other times I was prone to drawing a bubble chart and numbering the bubbles according to supposed importance. I kept lists in various formats, often reverting to messy scribbles in random places. I even had to make lists regarding the nature and whereabouts of my various lists. I didn’t have a real way to gauge levels of importance.
I learned about the “Eisenhower method” several months ago, and was totally blown away. This simple segmented box boasts 4 categories: urgent + important, non-urgent + important, urgent + non-important, and non-urgent + non-important. It has taken me many months to fathom how to put this method to use. Now I feel seasoned. Jessica Greene of Zapier elegantly illustrates such in her article, “How to prioritize tasks: 10 prioritization techniques”, along with numerous additional strategies for how to organize duties while prioritizing their value. She reveals that prioritization success is all about finding the right system and implementing it.
Here I will use the Eisenhower method to assign categories to the specifics in my life. Perhaps this will inspire you to do the same orienting and classifying of your own life’s details:
Urgent and Important:
I receive a call from my child’s school and am informed that he is sick.
It’s a medical emergency and I need to pick him up right away.
Non-Urgent and Important:
I receive a departmental email regarding the cutoff for student course withdrawal dates.
We still have a couple of weeks until students need to make the decision.
Urgent and Non-Important:
Someone rings my doorbell incessantly. They are advertising pool service.
I don’t have a pool.
Non-Urgent and Non-Important:
A coworker texts me that a cafe will be closed on Sunday.
I don’t plan on going to that cafe, especially not on a Sunday.
I seriously needed to hear various examples from friends and family many times over, until I really digested the above 4-box designation method. Due to my confusion learning this, I realized why in the past, decision-making had sometimes been really challenging— even defeating.
We can always glide along just taking care of things as they come up, but doing so is not productive (unless you are making sandwiches in a deli and it’s simply first-come-first-serve; then and only then are all sandwiches equally urgent and important). In most other cases, it can help to plan out a particular order in which tasks are tackled. Molly Talbert offers a clear step-by-step series in her article, “How to prioritize tasks in 4 steps (and get work done)”. I appreciate the way she indicates a simple route from task-list to method, then from scheduling to communicating. I am enlightened!
Some people use spreadsheets, while others use digital calendars. There are a few of us remaining who use paper wall calendars with a fabulous art feature per month. A couple of us might even still scrawl a reminder across the back of our hand with a marker. In a more modern mood, we might WhatsApp ourselves. Maybe we will prompt Meta’s Llama 3 AI assistant to create an image from text, so as to imprint color and texture into our mind’s eye for deeper recall (if we are visual learners). Perhaps we will telephone ourselves and leave a voicemail. Think back to the days when we used to call our home message machines from a street pay phone and leave a voicemail reminder for ourselves…those were the days.
No matter how we keep track of our responsibilities and plans, their importance designates their order. Alice Boyes assures us in her piece, “How to focus on what’s important, not just what’s urgent”, that contemplating during the act of scheduling is truly the act of giving oneself the grace of time. It may seem like an extra step to actually think deeply, to mindfully weigh levels of importance, but in the long run precious time is saved—and (non)precious stress is avoided.
If you were to answer all your emails in order received, regardless of their importance or relevance to your day, you could miss out on some really precious opportunities.
Imagine this:
Email 8:00am– your cousin wants to know what color you are wearing to his wedding in 3 months
Email 8:01am– your bank wants you to set up automatic payments for an ongoing insurance bill
Email 8:02am– the recruiter for your recent job interview wants to set up a 2nd interview for tomorrow morning
Email 8:03– your child’s school wants you to purchase a yearbook before the end of the school year, which is in 4 months
Email 8:04– your car was towed and found at a junkyard on the other side of town
Email 8:05– your boss wants to talk to you about the recent security guard hire
Email 8:06– you receive a 10% off coupon for new car tires, offer good for the next 2 weeks
Email 8:07– your partner asks you to make reservations for tonight’s dinner date with friends
If you answer the emails and follow through with the tasks in order received, what might you miss out on? What if you only have 10 minutes to assess and respond to these? Choosing what is the most important thing is crucial to both well-being and success. This can be applied to the job hunt process, as well as to personal relationships.
Being able to determine what is truly important has helped me save time and energy in order to devote it to other more meaningful tasks, and sometimes there is even a carryover of extra time and energy that can be spent purely relaxing or having fun.
Brent Barnhart emphasizes in his piece, “7 steps for prioritizing your workload”, that the key skill of breaking tasks up into chunks makes the details easier to approach because they are smaller and less daunting. This—along with using an order system—ensures ease.
Have you ever awoken early in the morning, but rather than feeling fresh with the sunrise, you feel burdened by the weight of the infinite things you must accomplish? In these moments you are emerging from the dreamworld in which anything was possible. Suddenly you are faced with the jolt of real life demands that en masse can seem like a 3000-headed monster with 50 rows of fangs each, and dozens upon dozens of claws.
Multiple tasks at sunrise might seem terrifying and potentially fatal to approach. However, with our prioritization methods in hand, said monster can be reduced to the humble puppy it truly is. We feed the puppy, walk the puppy, and clean up after the puppy. In steps, most anything is possible.
The point is, we all need to prioritize in order to get things done, especially when we are hunting for our next job. Without a system that works for us, we might allow chances to slip through our fingers like cinnamon powder on a windy day. Like the humid substance of a heat-wave. Like the teenage dreams we passed up on a whim, never to reconsider…until now!
It’s never too late to categorize your boxes!
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