Prioritizing your work schedule, sounds simple right? Nothing to it, keep a list of what you need to do and then figure out what needs to be done first. I have news for you a lot of people are not good at prioritizing and it hurts their productivity each day. The first key to prioritizing is you need a system to keep track of all your tasks. A good contact management system such as ACT, Goldmine, Salesforce.com and Highrise (37signals.com) will do just fine. Ensure your task list has some form of prioritization, such as high, medium and low priority. Sounds easy, but here is the hard part, you will find that a lot of your daily tasks do fall into the high priority category. This is what separates the people that can prioritize and those that cannot. The key here is to be able to quickly look at a 10-15 high priority tasks and quickly be able to figure out what to do first and last. f you are a sales person you likely will start with prospects that have made an inquiry with you in the last few hours. Our sales team makes it a policy to get back to prospects within 2 hours. So I recommend starting there, then you can look at prospects that are near closing and ensure you keep on them as much as possible to answer any questions and keep the sales process going. Furthermore, deal with customers inquiries that have come in and you have a sense they are not immediate (if immediate put them before the prospects). Finally deal with your internal items such as blogging, tweeting, writing a newsletter article etc. Most employees that are good at prioritizing do their internal work after hours as they want to get as much of the client and prospect work done during the day.

If you are in a non-sales role it really comes down to your work in progress queue and which clients were promised what deadline. These projects must come in front of internal items in order to be successful and often times you will have to start a project then change to another mid-stream to meet a deadline. I have managed a number of employees in my career and the productive employees are always the ones that have trained themselves to prioritize and the ones that struggle getting tasks done have a poor priority system.A few more tips to better prioritization:

• If you are unsure about your priority ask your manager, a good manager will be able to give you advice as to the correct priority.
• Be careful not to always do the tasks you like first, its human nature to do this but tasks such as cold calling or reviewing reports need to get done to ensure your job is done properly. Ask yourself is this a priority or just what I like to do first, stick to the priority.
• Lastly, look at your list and if there are quick items you can clear then try to do those first, this will decrease your task list and give you momentum to get the harder tasks done by the end of the day.

I truly believe one of the keys to success in any career is getting as many priority tasks done in the hours you work in a day. If you can master this you will be an effective contributor to your company.

Until next time, thanks for listening.

This entry was posted by John McDonald on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 7:50 am and is filed under Business, Sales and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.