Four Tips for Managing Your Priorities

Are you having a busy week? Having trouble deciding what to do and in which order? Then you’re not alone. Managing tasks, deadlines, colleagues and responsibilities can be hard work. Managing your priorities can sometimes feel impossible when everything feels like a priority and it’s hard to know where to focus your attention and in what order.

Fortunately, DSC has four ways to master managing your priorities, each with a practical ‘pro tip’ to help you succeed!

Recognise the difference between urgent and important

When it comes to prioritising, it helps to understand the difference between tasks that are urgent and the tasks that are important. Urgent tasks are the ones that require immediate attention, but they are not always strategically important. Conversely, important tasks tend to be more crucial to your organisation’s objectives and growth, but they may not always have immediate deadlines.

A great tool for distinguishing between the two is the Eisenhower Matrix, which divides tasks into four categories to help you decide on your course of action. These include:

• Urgent and Important: Do these tasks immediately.
• Not Urgent but Important: Schedule these tasks to do later.
• Urgent but Not Important: Delegate these tasks if possible.
• Not Urgent and Not Important: Eliminate or minimize these tasks.

Pro tip: This is a great way to prioritise, but here’s a way to use it in day-to-day life when you get an email. Firstly, create four sub-folders for your emails which mirror the above matrix. Then, the next time you get an email with a task to prioritise, you can instantly send it to the corresponding mailbox, and hey-presto, you have your inbox of tasks organised from the start!

Set realistic deadlines

You may often feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day or week, which in many ways, is true! So, accept that limitation and plan with it, rather than against it.

When planning your week, assign a realistic amount of time to your tasks. If it will take 30 minutes, then assign that time, if it will take all afternoon, then plan that into your diary. A task won’t get finished early because you assign it less time, it will just eat into time you have assigned to other things.

By taking control of your diary, you may also find that it’s not the big stuff that’s the issue. Remember to plan things like travel time, time between meetings, and time to eat lunch! These things take up lots of your day and you may not realise how much until you plot them in alongside your other tasks.

Pro tip: Use your email calendar to organise each task for the week ahead. You can set different colours to indicate the priority and you can assign more or less time to the task depending on what is required. Also, if you find that colleagues struggle with their time management, then when you set them a task, why not send them a calendar request which highlights the deadline. Including links or attachments to the calendar item will also help keep them to meet your deadline.

It’s ok to set boundaries

Sometimes, the smallest words are the most difficult. Saying ‘no’ can sometimes feel like a forbidden phrase, whether in the workplace or everyday life. This may be because of your position in the organisation or your relationship with the person asking. If your boss asks you for something, there’s a social pressure to accept, if a friend or colleague asks, there’s pressure not to disappoint or to be seen as supportive. So, how do you strike the balance and say ‘no’?

Firstly, just saying ‘No.’ is not the answer. The key is saying ‘No, but…’ and giving them a solution. If they’ve come to you for help, then there may be other ways to support them without you taking on another task, especially if you’re struggling to manage other priorities. Try phrases like; ‘No, but I could do it next week.’ Or, ‘No, but here’s another solution that I could do’.

It can also help to tell them why you can’t help immediately, to provide more empathy to the situation, for example, ‘No, sorry I have a pressing deadline to hit this week, but I could help next week’. You could also use our first tip to decide whether the task is important or urgent, so you can move other less important or less urgent tasks to accommodate it.

Pro tip: If you’ve mastered using your email calendar to plan your time and work, then your entire week’s tasks and much of the coming month will already be plotted into your calendar. So, when someone asks if you can deliver a task or meet with them, simply reply with ‘Sure, just find a space in my diary and send me a calendar request.’ This will let them see what’s possible and whether it would meet their deadline, without you needing to re-organise your planned workload. Plus, you can also reply with an alternative date if the task needs more time. To achieve this, make sure you and your colleagues have set up access to each other’s calendars in your Outlook settings.

4. Delegate work to others

Delegation is a good way to share the load and ensure that multiple or competing tasks can be delivered on time. You may be guilty of feeling like you are the only person who can do or understand certain tasks, so they must fall to you and no one else.

The reason for this may be because it can be very hard to let go of things and to trust others to deliver something that you are responsible for. You may feel like others can’t do the task as well as you. If this is the case, then you need to trust and support colleagues to deliver. They may surprise you with what they can do, and by switching your role to providing guidance rather than doing tasks, you can help your colleagues deliver more than you could alone in the available time.

Pro tip: By delegating, you’ll be sharing skills and experience with others, thereby developing your colleagues’ ability going forward, and helping you to distribute the load on this occasion, and in the future. So, be proactive in finding opportunities for colleagues to develop in this way. By doing this consistently, your team will become more skilled and more experienced when you need support.

What next?

‘Managing your priorities’ is really something of a misnomer. The real trick is to manage your ‘workload’ by identifying which tasks are a priority and which are not. Try to get into the swing of knowing what to prioritise (tip 1), then get organised (tip 2) and then manage that workload effectively (tips 3 and 4). Don’t forget that your workload probably won’t change, but mastering your ability to manage it and get the priorities sorted, can make life less stressful and more productive.

For more tips and inspiration, join DSC at The Charity Management Conference – Online on Thursday 6 March. Book your place now!

By Stuart Cole, age 43 and a quarter 😊

Join us at The Charity Management Conference

We understand that managing a charity can be tough and comes with a lot of pressure. It can be challenging to balance managing upwards and downwards.

That’s why we would like to invite you to The Charity Management Conference on Thursday 6 March. Throughout the day, we will explore new ways to navigate the multi-dimensional role of being a charity manager.

Register here today.