Task Management 101
An associate of mine, who is a very organised and driven businessman, recently showed me how he prioritises his workload to make sure he spends his time on the right tasks. He essentially divided a sheet of A4 paper into quarters and catagorised each task based on its urgency and importance. You can see what I mean with this diagram…
I thought this was great, but I also recently learned of another technique developed by Brian Tracy, author of a book called ‘Eat That Frog’. Brian’s book is all about how to stop procrastinating and manage your time and, it’s also now on my shopping list. Brian’s technique is called the “ABCDE method” and it prompts you to categorise your tasks based on whether they will have consequences to your business, whether a tasks needs attention because it will affect your business, tasks you can delegate etc. To get the full story, either read the book, or check out Aurelius Tjin’s post (and then buy the book) and watch his video.
Now, both techniques look pretty good to me, but they can actually be combined quite nicely. Essentially anything that is important and urgent, is a task that you must do to avoid consequences, whereas a task that is important but not urgent, you can probably delegate. Anyway, I combined into the chart below which I’ll be using from now on. Hopefully by properly categorising my task load, I can identify areas for prioritisation, delegation, or where I should simply let the task drop as it will not affect my business.
I would love to hear what time management and prioritisation techniques everyone else uses. I’m sure there must be some fantastic ideas and resources, whether simple paper based techniques as I’ve mentioned above, or maybe through Outlook tasks etc. Please, what works for you?
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