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If you’re feeling overwhelmed in your job, one of the first things to do is to take a step back, look at your role, and ask yourself, “What is core to my job and what is extra to my job? Where do I need to be perfect, and where can I just be good enough?”
Manage incoming tasks
In a typical workday, it can feel as if everything was due yesterday and everything needs to be done immediately. How do you make sense of what to do next when things can get so chaotic? It’s important to separate what is urgent from what is important. What is important is what is core to your job, the thing that you’re hired to do and the thing that other people are closely scrutinizing, especially those who are high up in the organization. If this was what you were hired to do, and this is the thing that the CEO of the organization is breathing down everyone’s necks to get done, there’s a pretty good chance that it’s important.
What is urgent is what is closest to the deadline and what may limit your options if you put it off. So if the big conference is happening tomorrow, everything related to the conference is now suddenly urgent. Scheduling meetings with other people can also be urgent because the longer you wait, the more others’ calendars may fill up and the harder it may be to get the job done. It’s important to separate what’s urgent from what’s important, because in the typical workday, you receive too many instant messages, emails and correspondences to respond to and you can spend all day on what is urgent. But in doing so, you risk crowding out what’s important, which speaks to the importance of blocking off time for what’s important. So if there’s that big project that’s looming, don’t put it off. Schedule some time, don’t schedule meetings then and get it done.
Use the Eisenhower Matrix
A framework that I and other professionals have found useful is called the Eisenhower Matrix. Draw a big square. Lay out what is urgent versus not urgent and important versus not important. Now take a look at your entire to-do list and ask yourself, “What is the most important thing that I can be doing right now and that has the most recent deadline?” Put that in the urgent and important box. What is urgent but not necessarily important? Put it in that box. What is important and not urgent? Put it in that box. And finally, what is neither urgent nor important, and put it into that box.
What are some examples of what we might classify under each of these boxes? What is urgent and important will be things that people are asking you for, expecting an update from you on, and that are core to your job and that the higher ups care a great deal about. So for example, if there is a big event that everyone is going to be attending and that you are in charge of, there’s a good chance that activities related to that are both urgent and important. People will notice if you don’t get the job done and do it well.
At the same time, there are going to be things that will be time sensitive but that aren’t going to be as important. For example, paperwork often will be in this category. If you happen to be a manager or have a teammate helping you, these might be opportunities for you to delegate this work off to someone else, to ask a coworker who doesn’t necessarily have to be the person doing the job to pitch in and to help.
And then there are going to be a lot of things that will be important, but not urgent, things that may have a looming deadline six months from now in which case you want to keep it on your to-do list but you don’t necessarily want to carve out the head space to do it now because you might just still be in the shower-thought phase.
And then finally, there are things that are neither important nor urgent and those are the things to get rid of because they’re just crowding out your desk space, your drive space, your head space and causing you to not be able to focus on what really matters.
How do you know you’re kicking butt at prioritizing? When three things are true. When one, you are doing what you say you will do. Two, when you’re not surprising anyone with a short submission, a late submission or a change of plans last minute. And three, you’re staying sane and staying happy while you’re doing all of this. And this is all possible if you are methodical about what tasks you take on, which tasks you do right now and which tasks to maybe shed from your life.