How to Plan and Prioritize Your Workflow
Work happens through sequences of behavior comprised of tasks.
Tasks are the specific units of work that actualize your values and key results.
But figuring out what task to do next can be challenging, especially when there’s a lot you have to do.
Instead of figuring this out on the fly using emotions and assumptions, a good workflow should do this for you.
Your workflow should help you spend time on the activities that matter while ignoring everything else.
In this post, you’ll learn:
How to capture and define your tasks
How to prioritize your tasks
How to plan your tasks
How to utilize a task manager to plan, organize, and get work done
How to Manage Your Tasks
Capture
“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” - David Allen
Throughout your days, you have countless ideas about what’s important to you and what you need to do to actualize it.
Most often, these ideas disappear just as fast as they come into our awareness. This is unfortunate because many of these ideas could probably become tasks that would help us actualize our key results.
When we try to hold everything in our heads, we’re more likely to forget, overlook, and assume. This is our default mode of operating. We have ideas and think of tasks, only to forget them later because we thought we’d remember them.
Capturing is about writing down your valuable ideas and tasks as you have them instead of trying to remember them in your head.
There are tons of benefits to capturing vs. remembering, specifically:
Capturing allows you to “free up” attention for the present moment. Remembering and keeping track of information uses valuable brain energy, and the brain can only hold onto so much information simultaneously. By capturing, you unload the task or idea from your brain, freeing up brain power for more valuable functions like problem-solving and creativity.
Capturing creates a kind of two-factor authentication for your ideas. When you have an idea, you’re immediately biased into thinking it’s a great idea. By capturing your ideas into a centralized list, you can return to that idea later and assess it with fresh eyes. This can improve your decision-making and reduce time wasted on flawed ideas.
Capturing makes you feel less stressed. Part of what makes us feel overwhelmed is uncertainty. The feeling of uncertainty is one of the most difficult mental states for a human to experience. When our goals, projects, and work are too ambiguous and poorly defined, we’re more likely to experience anxiety and overwhelm. These are not optimal states for getting important work done. Capturing tasks and ideas reassures us that nothing will “slip through the cracks” and that we’ll be able to get to everything when appropriate.
There are two methods for capturing tasks that you can use whenever starting or working on a project:
The Brainstorm Method
The Active Capture Method
The Brainstorm Method
When you start on a new project, one of the first things you should do is brainstorm the initial tasks you’ll need to work on. The Brainstorm Method is a great way to do this.
To use the Brainstorm Method of capturing, you first give yourself a prompt or guiding question, such as, “What tasks and actions would I need to complete to achieve this key result?” Then, engage in a two-step process of generating ideas and writing them down. You're done when you can no longer think of additional tasks or ideas to write.
The Brainstorm Method is great for:
Starting new projects and coming up with a list of tasks or ideas you need to complete
Problem-solving situations that require unique solutions
Coming up with creative ideas to improve a project
Planning out an event or idea
The Active Capture Method
After you’ve spent time on your various projects, tons of ideas and tasks will sporadically come to your awareness. This can happen during meetings, while you’re working, during breaks, or at any random moment.
The Active Capture Method is the simple act of immediately capturing (writing down) the task as soon as it comes to your awareness. Rather than holding that task in your head and hoping you’ll remember to do it later on at the right time, it’s better to add it to your task manager and let it prompt you at the right time.
Prioritize
After you start defining tasks through brainstorming and active capturing, you’ll end up with a long list of tasks and action steps.
But rather than starting at the top of that list and working your way down, you should first consider which tasks are most urgent and most important. This process is called prioritizing. Without first prioritizing your tasks, you could spend a ton of your valuable time on unimportant tasks that aren’t urgent. This is the opposite of productivity.
When you prioritize tasks, you should organize them according to two characteristics:
Importance: Does this task directly contribute to your key results?
Urgency: Are there consequences for not completing this task by a certain day or time?
This prioritization approach, called an Eisenhower Matrix, can be mapped onto a visual matrix to create four distinct quadrants:
After your tasks have been categorized into one of the above four quadrants, you can prioritize them much more quickly:
Quadrant One: Urgent + Important. These tasks and activities get done first since they directly contribute to your key results and have deadlines with consequences for not following through.
Quadrant Three: Urgent + Not Important. These tasks and activities usually feel like busy work but have deadlines and consequences for not following through. They’re the tasks that are urgent and need to get done, but they don’t necessarily contribute to your key results. It’s best to time-box these tasks into short periods throughout your week to ensure they don’t creep into the rest of your day. These tasks should be worked on after Quadrant One, but delegate these or remove them from your workflow at all costs when possible.
Quadrant Two: Not Urgent + Important. These tasks and activities should get done after Quadrant Two. These tasks contribute the most to your key results. But since they're not urgent, it's easier to procrastinate on these. It’s usually best to schedule these tasks into your calendar to ensure you make time for them.
Quadrant Four: Not Urgent + Not Important. Avoid these tasks and activities in your workflow at all costs. They’re the biggest time wasters and don’t contribute to anything important. These tasks usually make you feel guilty after you do them. It’s unlikely that any of these will ever make it into your task manager, but it’s always good to be on the lookout for these in your daily time expenditures. Like Quadrant Three tasks, strive to remove these from your workflow.
Schedule
Now that you have a prioritized list of tasks, the next step is to plan your tasks.
There are two steps to planning your tasks:
Determine the task’s due date. This is when the tasks need to be completed by, usually determined by outside factors, but can also be determined by you.
Determine the tasks’s do date. This is the date when you’ll work on completing the task.
After you’ve added due and do dates for your tasks, you’ll now have an organized and prioritized task list for each day of the week.
For more on time management, see How to Manage Your Time Effectively.
Prompt
Your prioritized task list is a form of prompting that guides your workflow. Each day will prompt you with a new list, and your objective is always to complete the list in order from top to bottom.
As you become aware of new tasks you need to work on, use Active Capturing to add those to your task list, along with the following:
A priority level
A due date
A do date
Your task manager (see below) should automatically sort your tasks into their respective days and order them based on the quadrant they belong to.
Download the LearnChangeDo Task Manager for Notion
While the steps above may seem tedious, a digital task manager makes the entire process seamless.
To implement the skills and systems from this post right away, click here to download the LearnChangeDo Task Manager for Notion.