Prioritizing Your Workload
Posted on August 1, 2008
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No matter how good you are at your job, you’re likely to find yourself “dropping the ball” if you can’t prioritize your workload. Prioritization is a skill that requires the balancing of quick, on-the-spot deadline assessment with the work you already have in progress.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with your workload and unsure of its priorities, draft a list of all of the tasks you need to accomplish in no particular order. Next, prioritize the items according to their deadlines and level of importance. In addition to this “master list”, also keep a daily to-do list, and move the action items you receive each day to either list.
If you find yourself missing important deadlines, train yourself to keep an eye out for priority flags marked “urgent” on emails, memos, packages or any other incoming correspondence. However, don’t assume that “low-priority” means that something isn’t important. If you have a deadline a year from now for a major project, for example, try to keep yourself on top of things by implementing your own project milestones and leaving reminders for yourself of these “mini-deadlines.”
Finally, touch base with your manager about the prioritization of your workload. If you’re not on the same page when it comes to which items are high-priority, then you might be knocking yourself out for nothing on one task while neglecting another that’s more important.
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