Essential Pointers On Saving Time By Prioritising Tasks Effectively

Good task management is vital for any business to run efficiently – especially one which is online, as you’re not necessarily there is person with your colleagues to discuss project management progress or go over daily briefs.

When managing large volumes of tasks and projects, a high degree of structure and organisation is crucial to completing them efficiently. A process or procedure should be in place for dealing with large projects, small tasks and regular tasks. This is a much larger subject in itself, so let’s go through a really simple method of prioritising which is an essential part of the task management process. First you need to take all of your tasks and put them on a list. You are then going to sort these tasks into 3 smaller lists.

List A is made up of 2 types of tasks – those which are essential or time-sensitive, and those which, if completed, are going to have an immediate impact upon your business. So write down anything which you can work on right now that will have a significant impact, whether this be making money or improving your business in an necessary way, and of course, anything which has a completion date.

List B is made up of the things which must be done, but are not time sensitive. An example of this may be tasks like filing.

List C is made up of projects and tasks which you would like to get done, but which have no impact on your current business and can be scheduled in at any time.

Once you have your lists completed, you will be able to easily prioritise these individual tasks into a detailed schedule. First of all, think carefully about these two points:

1. What tasks on your list could you automate?

2. What tasks on your list could you hand over to an expert virtual assistant?

Put these on a separate list, and deal with them first. The sooner you are able to do this for your A & B tasks, the sooner you can start to reduce the contents of these lists on a weekly or monthly basis, with the end result of creating more time for yourself.

For those tasks which you haven’t automated or outsourced to experienced virtual assistants, you will need to organise these into jobs for yourself. Each job you’re going to do should be broken up into tasks, and each task should be considered as a ‘Milestone’, and each milestone would have a checklist of smaller tasks, which once all checked off, will enable the milestone to be completed.

To begin with, take each of the milestones in your A list, and then break the milestones down into checklists of jobs which need to be done in order to complete the milestone. For this process, I strongly advise that you utilise top notch online project management software to organise this enterprise – especially if you’re working with a virtual assistance service, as the majority of these things could possibly be outsourced at a later date. Most online collaboration software will let you develop multiple projects so you can manage comprehensive milestones and tasks.

Once you have done that for List A – do the same for list B, and if you have time, you may want to do this for list C too, but usually the C list is set to one side for when A and B are both entirely complete.

This will of course need to be scheduled into a daily plan, and this plan must be tailored according to the amount of tasks you have and the volume of time which is available to you – but as a general rule, your work should progress steadily and everything should get done.

To plan your schedule, take fifteen minutes to allocate your tasks before you begin each day, as this will establish a specific path to follow and help you to acquire a more substantial feeling of achievement upon finishing your working day.