Prioritization Practice

In my continuing series on Key Principles I discuss Prioritizing.

Prioritizing maybe one of the most important of my Key Principles and also be where I fail the most at.

Tim Ferriss in his great book The Four-Hour Workweek discusses two main principles:

1. 80/20 Principle aka Pareto's Law
2. Parkinson's Law

So I've come up with the idea of Prioritization Practice.

You need to practice prioritizing thing to be good at it.

Prioritizing is basically taking a list of items and sorting it by what you should do first or what you should do now.

One of the first rules is "What is the nearest deadline?"

A second rule is "What's a small task to get out of the way?"

What's not important?

Look at two items and if you could only do one of the tasks which one would you do?

So the process I've come up with will help you do an almost 80/20 sort.

Take your list and split it into two equal size lists. Say you have 100 items. Split the list into top 50 and bottom 50.

Then take the top 50 and split it again into top 25 and bottom 25.  You now have 75/25 which is pretty close to 80/20.

So that's the 80/20 rule. But now for Parkinson's Law - Work fills the time allocated.

The best way to see Parkinson's Law in practice is when you're late or wait until the last minute. Somehow all your energy is focused on getting the job done as best you can in the limited time you have.

The best tool to help with this is to set and Egg Timer and do as much as you can in this time frame. A good article on this in another KP I call FTAD (Finish Then Add Details).

So now every day you need to practice prioritizing. But you also need to do what you've prioritized to take action and make prioritization a habit. There are many ways to create and remove habits. I'll add my method in a future post.

Give it try now. But remember there are 2 steps

1. Prioritize
2. Take action