Task Management – How to Decide What Task to Do First

So here is how to decide what to work on first. I’m going to give you two techniques, two different approaches, and I actually use both of them. The first approach is the most intuitive, the most logical. And this is the simple approach of figuring out what’s most valuable. Often times, it’s not easy to weigh two things against each other and figure out which one is going to be more valuable. Sometimes I’ll actually just try to figure out which is more valuable by asking how much money will it be worth. Now I don’t like to idolize money or turn money into God, but sometimes, it’s a great little measuring stick or measuring tool. So let’s say I have two things that I could do. One of them is I know I’ve got a bunch of e-mails that I need to answer, and another one is I know I need to create a sales letter because I’m launching a product. If I look at these two things and ask myself, “Okay, who are the e-mails likely to be from? What’s the value of the e-mails? If I answer all those e-mails, how much money will that actually wind up making?”

Versus if I create this sales letter that’s going to sell a bunch of my products, how much value will that create? And on the e-mails, I might estimate, “You know what? If I answer all those e-mails, it’s probably going to be worth like $50.00, where as if I create this sales letter, it’s going to lead to the sales of thousands or tens of thousands, or probably more; probably hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of products. Clearly, doing this sales letter is more important.”

Now you have to deal with the competition between things that are urgent and things that are important, as Stephen Covey likes to talk about. But once you can really get a beat on the value of things, and you can challenge yourself and ask, “Okay, if I had to guess, how much money would this thing be worth if I get it done?” Then it’ll quickly show you which things are more important. So the first technique: just put a value next to it. Put a dollar value. How much will it be worth if you get that thing done? Then put the highest value thing at the top. Now the other technique is actually counter-intuitive, but it can be very valuable. And this is usually handy where you’ve got a list of a bunch of different things that you have to do, and you want to make sure that you get all of them done.

And again, this works when you’ve got a lot of things. They might not be big projects. They’re just kind of a punch list of things to do. What you do is you take the thing you don’t want to do most, the thing that is going to suck, and you put it first. Then you put the second worst thing second and the third worst thing third. And let’s say you have a list of ten things. By five or six, you’re getting into things that you kind of like doing and enjoy, and you want to take the best thing, the most enjoyable, the most fun thing to do, and put it last. Now the logic here is that if you make your list in reverse order of the things that suck the most, the things that are going to be the hardest to do, the least fun, that you’re going to plow through those things because you’re going to want to get them out of the way, and you’re going to want to get to the thing you really enjoy doing the most.

So take these two techniques and try them out right now. Make a list of all the things that you need to get done right now, and then next to each of them, write down the dollar value. If you get the thing done, how much will it be worth to you in money? Just estimate. Then take the thing that’s worth the most and put at the top and do that one first. That will dramatically increase your productivity and your results. Next, take the list of things and put them in order from the worst thing, the thing you’re going to not enjoy the most, all the way to the best thing. The thing that will be the most fun, and then get to work. So try these two techniques. They both work great. I use both of them. Try them out, and let me know how they work for you.

I’m Eben Pagan, creator of the Wake Up Productive Time Management and Productivity Training Program. If you’d like to watch my 47-minute video on how to manage yourself and your time and become dramatically more productive, just go to http://www.WakeUpProductive.com and enter your name and e-mail address, and you can watch this video worth $100.00 for free.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Eben_Pagan
http://EzineArticles.com/?Task-Management—How-to-Decide-What-Task-to-Do-First&id=3721982