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I am here to do another Work Wednesday post which I am so excited to share with you all. I love being able to write these posts because I get to share with you a portion of my life that is a major piece of what I do on a regular day to day basis. The number one question I get is about prioritizing my time. This is something that a lot of people do not fully grasp and can make their life and ultimately their work effort not effective if they don’t prioritize their time well. I have to constantly remind myself to prioritize my time well and jot down things so that I am not only effective at work, but for my blog as well. It is all about prioritizing and making your day a success through this all. Below are some of the tips I take and the benefits for prioritizing your time.

How to Prioritize Your Time

• Wake Up with a Plan: I like to start every morning with a plan of what I have to do, things I can’t forget to complete during that day, and an overall mission statement for the day. This helps me wake up on the right path to get moving and set my mind straight. Having something on my agenda that I can see and know what is coming up early helps me realize what I need to focus more on.
• Categorize Your Tasks: Writing down your top 3 tasks that you have to get done for each category helps tremendously in the prioritization. I think being able to categorize these according to any personal to-do’s you have to do i.e make appointments and work tasks help with this. I also like to color code these specific tasks based on work or personal items as well. This helps me to visually see what is important in different categories. You can also break this out to categories within your job like different projects or clients you have as well.
• Filter Tasks/Emails from Key Contacts: You need to always get to tasks from your leadership at work first. If your director or CIO sends you an email or asks you to do something, you need to do that task first. I don’t know about you but I get hundreds of work emails a day. If a key contact sent me an email I wouldn’t wait a couple of days to respond to something from one of these leaders. It is important to prioritize with people like that. So many times we can get pulled in different directions from so many people giving us requests. It is important to prioritize these key contacts.
• Delegate When You Can: This is one of those areas that I know I can struggle with a ton. Sometimes you just go ahead and complete the task or attend the meeting because you think it will take less time for you to do it, or you know exactly how you would like it. Even though in turn it might make sense at that moment, in the long run you are just wasting more time in this process with the more you eventually take on.
• Be Smart with Your Time: There are some people who work 40 hours a week and do it smart, and then there are others who work 70 hours and don’t necessarily work smart. If you find yourself being bombarded with meetings, have no time to answer emails, and are not working smart with your time and energy at work, then you will end up being one of those 70 hour work week types. You will burn out quickly and is there really something that can’t wait until the next day?
• Don’t Multi-Task: I know we all have about 5 things going at once 24/7. We might think we can listen to music, have a conference call going, answering emails, and completing our tasks, but this does not work. Time wise we might think we have gotten a lot more done than we thought, but it is not the most effective way to complete tasks. This is not how our brain is supposed to function and in turn confuses us and leads to more re-work in the long run. Instead focusing your full attention on one task and using a timer if you have to will be the more effective way to prioritize your time.

These are my tried and true tips that I personally use at work to prioritize my time. I think this is one of the most important skills that we can learn in the work place that will be one of the most beneficial as well. It is hard to change habits, but trying to start these and utilize some of these tips will help us be better at prioritizing. I hope you use these tips and let me know how your progress goes.