Tuesday 9 August 2016

Prioritize or Die

I was late for office, I had time given to a banker guy to meet me at work. I had to pick some stationary for my son, I had to go to the bank and deposit some money which I was carrying in cash, I had to make a call to a potential customer on the way, I had a report to send to my boss, I had a issue to be responded that affected a customer,

All of this was running in my mind when I was driving to work and every fraction a thought was triggering on why I did not read that " 7 habits of successful men". In any case I had things to do, I had important things to do. When I finished my day, I was left with 1 thing... the most important one. Priorities can be so much a killer, specially when you procrastinate or do not care about it most importantly if you don't prioritize.

Priority is usually a challenge, for most; this is just not natural. A husband and wife at the age of 45, staying in my neighborhood once told me that they lost both their parents and never had time to even sit and speak to them since it never made a priority in all the trips, travel, work and running a business.

Priorities are to be thought of carefully and executed with some level of commitment to avoid mess. Since my experience with messed up priorities I have always worked them out on a simple rating scheme.

Impact vs Effort : Higher the impact and Lower the effort makes it easy to decide the priority. A simple rule is to fit the items to be worked out in a simple chart



Every item goes into a simple table

Task                                 Impact Score                       Effort Score
Fix Issue with door            7                                            5
Shop clothes                       3                                           8
Pack Bags for Travel          8                                           4

The scores are then sorted by high impact and low effort and life can be easy to decide the priority. Most times since this information is never analysed before starting work, people tend to miss on priorities,

BTW there is no excuse to missing priorities for forgetting and procrastinating.

S


        

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