Author: Jason Pampena, Master NLP Coach-Practitioner
Coaching 4 Change

If you find yourself exhausted at the end of the day and leave work with a feeling that you did not accomplish half of what you had planned, you probably are spending too much time on the wrong tasks.  Do you find yourself taking action on the quick and dirty tasks because there are many of those and if you can reduce the number of things you need to do you then can focus on the important stuff?  I am sure that most people especially when frustration kicks in, start toclear tasks that are easy first,  before you know it half the day is gone and a call comes in from a client complaining their priority request has not been completed.  Panic, urgency and ultimately more stress bare down on you.

Here is a simply priority quadrant you can use to help you work through your tasks.  What is important in using this tool, your honesty with yourself.  Ask yourself with each task how important and how urgent is it?  Place it within one of these quadrants. 

• High Importance – High Urgency: this more than likely needs to be done by your and needs to be done immediately regardless of complexity or time.  If this one is ignored this is where you will customer complaints and/or miss deadlines
• High Importance – Low Urgency: this one needs to be done but not immediately, so as not to forget this one and have become urgent you would need to put a timeline on when you are going to do it and hold yourself to it.
• Low Importance – High Urgency: This task should more than likely be delegated to someone else on the team because there is likely a short timeline on completion.  If you delegate you must do so properly so the person doing the task is clear on what you expect.
• Low Importance – Low Urgency: These tasks although you may many can be put on the back burner.  Revisit them when you have completed your high priority tasks.  In many case you will find that many of these tasks will disappear or no long be a requirement.

Be diligent on how you use this matrix and truly use facts to help slot your tasks in the appropriate quadrant.  You must also have the behavioural flexibility to move tasks from quadrant to quadrant as level of importance and urgency changes.