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How to Set Goals and Prioritize
Learn the six critical steps to effective time management: set your goals and prioritize the activities to achieve them.
You’ve finally sat down to write your tasks for the week and start to worry as you stare down a mile-long list. Then, your supervisor calls you in and adds a few more “must-do” assignments to the pile. Right after, your spouse calls to let you know that you have plans every night this week, and you remember that you promised your son you would leave early on Friday to spend time with him.
Your week has just started, and your blood pressure is already sky-high.
Most of us find ourselves in this situation again and again. If you find yourself consistently missing deadlines and struggling to get ahead, then it’s time for you to rethink your time management with goal setting and task prioritization.
Why Goals and Task Prioritization Matters
Goals and task prioritization are not about putting more tasks on your schedule. Instead, it’s about identifying which activities will have the biggest net gain to help you achieve your goals.
Setting goals and priorities can help clarify your decision-making and ensure that you’re spending your time where it actually counts. You can use it in your professional life to help you take control of your time.
Setting priorities is critical for getting the most of your time, but it is also where most of us struggle most. We quickly get lost in time-sensitive activities and fail to make room for what’s important.
The 6 Steps to Prioritization
When it comes to creating a schedule that enables you to get the most important things done, follow these six steps:
#1: Pinpoint Your Goal
To determine how you will be spending this time, start with what exactly it is you want to accomplish. Are you finishing a big project up at work, getting ready for a golf tournament, or looking to learn a new skill?
Your priorities and schedule should align with your overall goals, so start with the end in mind. It allows you to take control and speed up your decisions to make movements towards what you want to accomplish.
#2: Identify All the Tasks
Once you have figured out your overall goals, work backward to identify everything you need to do to reach your goals. Get everything out of your head and write out all of the tasks needed to accomplish your objectives.
In this step, don’t worry about prioritization or scheduling. Just write down the tasks whichever way works best, whether with pen and paper, on your phone or laptop. Break down large tasks into manageable pieces. For example, if your goal is to make $1.2 million in sales for the year, that would translate into $300K per quarter, $100K a month, and $25K a week.
#3: Prioritize Your Tasks
You don’t have to do all of the tasks that you outline above. In fact, you probably can’t. But figure out the ones that are absolutely critical versus those that are not as important. The key to deciding this is by asking, which of these tasks has the biggest net gain?
Identify which tasks are urgent from the important ones. In this video, Casey Clark, CEO, and Co-Founder of Cultivate Advisors, explains the difference between urgent and important:
As Casey states, urgent tasks need to be done quickly, while important tasks will have the most impact on the end goal. In Stephen Covey’s popular book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” he recommends separating all of your tasks into one of four quadrants:
- Urgent and important
- Not urgent but important
- Urgent but not important
- Not urgent and not important
While you can’t always avoid having tasks in quadrant one, most of the tasks you tackle should be in quadrant two. Plus, the better you get at tackling your tasks, the more time you’ll spend in quadrant two.
#4: Assign a Time Frame
Once you’ve decided which tasks are most important, it’s time to figure out how much time you’ll need for each activity. Assigning a time frame for each activity will also let you know when you reach capacity and can’t take on any more.
Overestimate how much time each task will take. If you’re generous with your time, you won’t have to deal with the stress of unfinished work. It will also allow you to have a little extra time each week if an emergency pops up.
#5: Schedule the Tasks
Once you know what you need to do and how long it will take, it’s time to put it in your schedule. Put it in your calendar so that you have to go and do it.
Sometimes writing a schedule is easy. If you only have a handful of tasks, it can be easy to fit it all in on your calendar. However, if you have a lot of activities you’ve identified to reach your goal, it can get overwhelming to figure out how to order your schedule. When you have a lot to do, go back and identify the urgent and essential tasks to schedule first. Then prioritize the rest depending on where they land on your categories.
#6: Track and Review
Take a few minutes at the end of the week to reflect on what went right and wrong. Some questions you might want to consider include:
- Did you estimate the right amount of time?
- Did you prioritize correctly based on importance and urgency?
- Did you hit your goals?
Prioritizing and scheduling take practice, and few people get it right from the start. By analyzing your victories and failures, you’ll be able to get better results each week.
Tips for Better Prioritization
It takes time to sort your priorities and create an effective schedule that gets you closer to your goals. Here are some ways to make it easier:
- Expect the unexpected. If things get slow and you find you’re ahead of your schedule, pull a few things forward. That way, you have even more space in case an urgent citation pops up during the week.
- Schedule development time. Invest in your most valuable resource: you. Schedule time for learning and growing each week. If you’re not sharpening the saw, you’re wasting time and effort.
- Take time to plan. Put planning on the calendar and make it a priority. Put aside one hour a week and two hours a month to get your goals and calendar aligned.
- Remove unnecessary decisions. There’s a reason Steve Jobs stuck with his turtlenecks and jeans, and Mark Zuckerberg rocks a gray shirt every day. Eliminating small choices that aren’t important allows you to concentrate on what does. Consider sticking with regular clothing choices, trusting your calendar to guide your next moves, and packing a lunch to pare down the decisions you have to make during the day.
- Don’t automate everything. Automating and sticking to a schedule is critical for maintaining professional success. However, don’t make the mistake of outsourcing and automating everything. For example, relationships, skills development, and decision-making all require your active input.
Take Control of Your Time with Prioritization
All of the productivity tips in the world won’t help if you don’t have your goals and priorities in mind. Being productive doesn’t necessarily mean getting more done. Instead, it’s about getting the right things done. Setting goals and prioritizing your tasks based on them can help move you away from endlessly chasing random jobs and missing deadlines to achieving what really matters.
With practice, you can eliminate the stress in your schedule and start reaching your goals. Start setting priorities and putting them on your calendar today to take back your time. Take your productivity to the next level with in-depth productivity training and sign up to take the 9-part course with Personal Productivity Series.
