A simple, but effective guide on how to prioritize tasks you need done

How do you know when to do something?
How do you know that a task is important, or urgent?

How do your know what to do right now?
How do you prioritize your tasks needed for work, or study?

My friends, chances are you’ve also got plenty of stuff to do. Or things to learn from your curriculum, if you’re a learner too.

And you might also find yourself, like me, overwhelmed when you’re looking at a learner’s syllabus, or an outline of topics you need to learn. That it leaves you not knowing where to begin. Does this sound familiar to you also?

Or, in the case of workers like myself in the office — of stuff you need to work on. And therefore, work that needs to be done in order to contribute to your team, to your colleagues and co-workers.

For me, I always need something simple enough that I could integrate it to my habits throughout my waking hours.

If it is helpful, if it’s simple enough, and possible for me to do, and if it’s a good habit to form. First, I need to study it. This means, learning how can I put it to practice alongside my daily routines. Doing it with careful reminders, or alerts from a calendar app. Until I have a good cadence going. According to book authors about productivity, it takes a while to form a habit. Some say it takes a number of weeks until a good habit is formed. Or, from another different perspective, it also takes a while until a bad habit is removed, and dismantled from your routine.

My friends, a habit is necessary to form, so that we can follow something consistently.

Some time ago, I stumbled across this prioritization box, or, what is known as “Eisenhower’s quadrants” or “Eisenhower’s box”.

And it looks like this…

Eisenhower’s strategy for taking action and organizing your tasks is simple. Using the decision matrix above, you will separate your actions based on four possibilities.

  1. Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
  2. Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
  3. Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
  4. Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
From the website of James Clear, book author of “Atomic Habits”.

It’s a simple approach that I could remember, and actually do. It helps me with how I decide which tasks to do right now, or at this time. Which tasks I could postpone doing for later. And which tasks or things I could ask someone else to do (or this means to delegate). And finally — what tasks to remove from my “to-do” list.

Try it, my friends.

For me, at least in my opinion and from my experience working at this method — it helps.

And also, don’t beat yourself up, if sometimes you find yourself having no choice but to deviate from what this box suggests. To move away from a decision path made from this prioritization box. Please bear in mind, that things can happen — and do happen. And a lot can still change in the course of a day, or, maybe things will change after nightfall, and across the night.

You may find yourself, needing to delegate to someone else — something that you worked on as a priority several hours ago. Or, you might suddenly need to postpone something you have just asked someone else to help you with.

This prioritization box aims to help as a guide. A guide that helps you put a structure to your day-to-day work, or study.

Hoping this helps, and I apologize for writing this post short.

Perhaps later, I’ll make a note to myself to add some more content to this post. At this present moment, I need to make time to do some hands-on practice of what I’m currently studying about for a few weeks now.

Then later on today, I’ll need to do some uncle-kuya duties for my toddler nephew. And for me this means, that I’ll need to help family to get around where they need to be at. Or, in some cases, to help look after my very active 4-year old nephew. Our nephew, who is one of our sources of joy of the family. Let’s call it togetherness of the household. Children can do that in a family.

Well, that’s it for now my friends.

Thank you for spending your time with me.

And I hope this post helps you toward your own goals — as you do your work, or, as you study for an exam, or whatnot.

Salamat po!

May God bless you.