Prioritization is one of those essential skills that you need to master if you want to get the best results from your efforts and those of your team members. With the help of prioritization, you can create peace in your life and manage your time so that you can put your energy and focus on the things that really matter.

The importance of prioritization becomes clear especially when the time is limited but the tasks are immeasurable. Prioritizing helps you spend your precious time wisely and allocate it to the tasks that are most important. In this way, you can free yourself and your team from less important tasks and deal with them at another time. Or to become completely indifferent to those things very quietly.

With proper prioritization (and careful management of prioritized tasks), you can bring order to chaos and disorder, greatly reduce stress, focus your and your team members’ energy on the most important tasks, and achieve successful results. Without prioritization, you’re just like a fish caught in a fishing net, desperately scrambling and flailing to save yourself from the pile of tasks and tasks.

Simple prioritization

In the simplest form of prioritization, tasks are ordered based on only one factor. This factor can be time constraints, the potential benefit and usefulness of the task, or the pressure you feel to do anything.

Probable profit and project value are the most common basis used for prioritization. This possible profit, whether it is the result of mere estimation or obtained by accurate measurement and financial calculations, often leads to the most optimal and effective results

If other people’s work is stuck before you and their project will not move forward until you fulfill your responsibilities, it is better to make the time limit the basis of prioritization; Especially if doing that work has an impact on the success of an important project.

When a boss pressures an employee to deliver work and has a valid and logical reason for doing so, no one but a fearless (and perhaps stupid) person resists that pressure.

Prioritization tools

A simple form of prioritization works in many situations; But there are certain cases where if you really want to do things right, you will need different tools for prioritization and time management. Here are some of these tools

Pair by pair comparative analysis

Pair comparison analysis is useful when the decision-making criteria are used. The opinion is vague, abstract or contradictory. In this type of analysis, you compare each of the items in a list one by one with each of the other items in the list and in this way you prioritize the available options.

Every time you compare two items, you have to decide which one is more important. Combining the results of these decisions will give you a prioritized list.

Work prioritization matrix

In this quick and simple method, for each task, you draw a graph of the value of that task according to the amount of effort it requires

By pulling this chart, you can quickly identify the “quick wins” that provide the best rewards in the shortest amount of time. You can also eliminate from your schedule by identifying “unproductive programs” that take a lot of time but don’t produce much results. This technique is an innovative way to  Making correct and effective decisions about priorities It counts

.For more information, see Read the task prioritization matrix

Eisenhower’s Principle of Importance/Urgency

This technique is a bit like the task prioritization matrix. The Eisenhower Principle requires you to categorize your tasks into four groups based on their importance and urgency.

Many times, tasks that seem urgent are actually not that important. For very important activities (for example, trying to achieve big life goals) there is often no urgency. The Eisenhower principle will help you deal with this issue more easily

Ansoff matrix and Boston matrix

These two matrices give you some general rules that you can use to make decisions about possible opportunities.

with Ansoff matrix  You can measure the risks and risks of each case and prioritize based on them.

How it works

Pareto analysis

When you’re faced with a pile of problems, Pareto analysis helps you identify the most important changes you need to make

Pareto’s working method is that you first identify the root cause of every problem. Then you place the problems in different groups based on their root cause. Finally, by counting the problems of each group, you determine the most common cause of the problem. This way, you can focus on fixing the most common problem and save time on

An edited version of the Burda-style vote counting

One of the useful techniques for prioritizing issues and group projects is a modified version of Borda-style voting. In this method, all people can play an equal role in the prioritization process. Burda’s method is especially useful in two situations; When it is important to reach a general consensus in the group and when it is necessary for the decision of the members of a group to be completely decisive and coordinated

The way of working is that each member of the group announces the issues that he thinks are important. Then the members rank the raised issues based on priority. The obtained ranks are added together and thus the final priority is determined. The fairness of this method has made it really useful in different situations; Especially when the prioritization criteria are abstract or when it is necessary that all members of the group agree with the specified priorities