I really believe that when you’re right up against it, doing anything is best. The time you spend choosing between similar projects – similar in interest, difficulty, reward, promise for future work – is definitely better spent just getting on with one. And that time might even be the difference between finishing one thing on time or finishing none.
But.
Many people disagree with me and say you have to prioritise before you can do anything. Seriously, though, I need to buy a curry from Asda and I need to make some edits to a short story. You know which is most important but depending on when you read this, you can’t tell which is the most urgent. It’s a production deadline vs a supermarket closing and my stomach collapsing. So priority is overridden by urgency. I would rather get on with the work than try to juggle all this.
But:
We know multitasking rarely works, so if we want to get through long to-do lists, we need to know where to start and what order to work through them in.
So how do we decide what to do first, what can wait, what we can delegate and what we can get away with not doing at all?
The priority matrix, which balances importance of tasks with urgency, is attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Kylie goes on to quote Eisenhower blowing off steam about urgency vs priority too. But where I run away to work, he gets a’plottin and according to this article ranks everything in a grid like this:
Read more in the full article.