A long task list bogging you down?

Are you all too familiar with long task lists? If yes, you might wonder how to beat the pile of jobs staring at you. In today’s edition of The Top newsletter, we will figure out the secret to unraveling the road to accomplishing all you need to do. 

The first step in ensuring that you avoid getting stuck on endless to-do lists lies in effective time management, which calls for prioritization and routines. If you head into the office without any idea of what you will do, you will be sure to spend the first hour wondering where to get started. As you keep sledding along the day, the confusion only increases. Ultimately, it can leave you feeling drained and allow procrastination to set in. It harms your productivity and significantly hurts your team’s workflow, creating a lose-lose situation for everyone. 

So, what’s the way out? Prioritizing tasks effectively is the keystone to managing your time at work. It is the process of ranking tasks in the order they need to be pursued. It helps managers finish critical tasks on time and keep chaos at bay. Moreover, by smartly prioritizing tasks, managers can identify the scope for delegation and save time for strategically vital jobs. The clarity and reduced stress are added advantages as well. 

The fundamentals of good prioritization are recognition of importance and urgency. After having a look at your task list, you need to denote the level of importance and urgency attached to each task. The most important and urgent ones go to the top and become the most prioritized ones—the rest fall in descending order of both features. Further, you can identify the competencies needed to complete the tasks. Then, if your team can handle it, you can delegate it to them. 

Effective prioritization for teams is critical to ensuring that managers constantly stay on top of deadlines. The difference between teams prioritizing tasks and those heading straight into the wilderness can be seen prominently in their performance. While the first one runs on an organized cadence towards its goals, the other can find itself attempting to do everything everywhere all at once, miserably. 

Your prioritization skills, as a manager, play a crucial role in ensuring that your team does not resemble the latter. You can test your prioritization skills for free with Risely’s self-assessment for managers. The prioritization skills self-assessment helps managers correctly sync their team’s priorities by identifying the loopholes that weaken prioritization frameworks. In addition, a thorough analysis is an excellent aid for managers struggling to keep up with work. 

In addition to prioritization, the other important feature in completing tasks is setting and meeting deadlines. Once you have the list of top-priority items you need to deal with, you need to determine a timeline for them. Setting a deadline for finishing work is an essential step in this. While defining deadlines is simple enough, meeting them is where the arduous task lies. 

The key to consistently meeting deadlines is setting them effectively for your team. For instance, ask your team to submit reports of tasks as soon as they are completed. Unsurprisingly, it may not work as they do not have the time to do it. But, if you provide them a day to submit a report after a task, they can do it much more quickly and efficiently. 

In this manner, managers should remember that the deadlines are realistic. The team members should not feel that deadlines are imposed on them. Instead, team members’ active involvement in setting deadlines will be more fruitful when they know what is being asked of them. Deadlines should arrive as conclusions to defined procedures. Putting deadlines without homework, such as providing resources and designing roadmaps, is setting your team up for failure. 

In our detailed blog, you can read more about meeting deadlines and setting them effectively as a manager. 

A manager regularly beats stress and ambitiously moves toward their goals to reach new heights. However, there’s more to unleashing productivity in the workplace. It requires clarity on what you want and how you will achieve it. Smartly managing time and tasks are two critical aspects of getting things done like a boss with your team. Stay with us as we discover more about efficient management in the coming weeks!