Do you love a post-it note? Is that enough to help you focus on the most critical things on your ever-growing “urgent” list? Prioritising can be hard at the best of times and in this episode, Jenni helps you by sharing three tools from her toolkit. She looks at the chaos that comes from a lack of prioritisation. And touches on the importance of clarity for your team to ensure you’re being realistic and fair to yourself as part of the process.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Managing stakeholders S2 E6
Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Staying focused S1 E3
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about how to prioritise. When I was planning the content for this season, prioritisation came up a few times because it’s something that really does affect us all. And I know that I have periods of time where I find it hard to see what I should be doing next. And I have many a post-it note around my desk. But I’ve got many tools in my toolkit that help me. And I thought this would be a good one to share in case it’s something that you’re experiencing at the moment.
It seems to be a bit of a fallout from the pandemic and the crisis mode that many leaders and communicators were working in during the pandemic. And it sort of just carried on into becoming a bit of a norm.
So, in this episode, I’m going to share the chaos that comes from a lack of prioritisation and the three tools that you can use to help you. We’ll touch on the role of leading and sort of clarity for your team. But I’ll also make sure that you’re being realistic and fair to yourself because that’s a big part of prioritisation.
What happens when you don’t or you can’t prioritise?
Well, being able to work through things in an order of priority can be really challenging in the workplace. And part of that is because we have competing stakeholders asking for help or support. So, where do you start when you’ve got all these different people coming at you requesting lots of different things and they all need them, you know, yesterday?
And it often gets to the point that those who shout loudest just get heard first. And that doesn’t always mean that they should. You know, people are clever. They know that if they’re going to be annoying that you’ll probably do the work just to get them to go away.
But this links a lot to the episode from season two that I did around managing stakeholders. So I’ve popped a link in the show notes to that episode so you can have a listen because it talks about how you can group stakeholders and how you can manage them. And that just might be a useful accompaniment to this episode.
Are you organised and do you know how to ask the right questions?
Now, some of this is about being organised and also asking the right questions, both of those around you, but also of yourself. So the chaos can come when there isn’t any prioritisation and it will look like missing deadlines, missing requests, feeling overwhelmed, spending a few minutes on one thing and then a few on another.
So, that sort of inability to focus. And in the worst case, it can also lead to a breakdown in relationships. And that also links to trust. Now, that last one is the big one, because if you’re struggling to prioritise, you’ll often end up letting someone down and therefore not doing what you said you would do. And this has links to integrity, credibility and trust, which are really some of those foundations for relationship at work. So it’s important for us to be realistic about deadlines. It’s important for us to acknowledge if we’re not going to hit something. Because maintaining those relationships and not breaking down the trust is going to be really important.
How do you go from chaos to calm?
Well, there are a few things to think about when it comes to prioritising. And I’m going to share three tools for you to use so that you can look at how you can put better boundaries in place, but also how you can take more control of your time.
1. Quadrant box method
The first tool I want to mention is one that I came across really early on in my career. I think it was my third job. And it was the urgent important matrix. And this matrix helps you plot tasks on a grid. So, if you draw a rectangle and then divide that into four quadrants, you’ve kind of got the basic structure. And then along the bottom, you can have high and low importance. And then on the vertical axis, if you like, you’ve got the urgency.
So you end up with four boxes where the box in the top right could be high urgency and high importance. And top left would be low urgency and low importance, if that’s making sense. I’ll pop a link to a blog post in the show notes so you can see this as a bit of a visual. But I remember doing this on a bit of A3 paper, I think. And I had tiny, tiny post-it notes where I could write the tasks on and then I could plot them into the relevant grid.
So, I could move things that were, say, low urgency, high importance. And I might, after reflecting on it, move it into a different box. And this is a technique that I come back to quite often because it’s quite helpful to understand where things fit. If something’s high urgency and high importance, then that’s the thing I need to do now. If something is low on both of those, then can I delegate that or can I move that into a different time frame?
It just helps you stop and have that reflection over what’s actually urgent and what’s actually important. And we use urgent a lot. I know I certainly have some clients who will often say, “This is really urgent, we really need to do something.” And then it can go a little bit quiet for a while. So we just need to check in with that language as well when we’re being asked to do something. Is it really urgent and sort of what are the time scales? So that’s a really good technique, that sort of quadrant box and then writing your tasks out and moving them around depending on where they might fit.
2. Three column list
The first column is for things that you hate doing. The second column is for things that you shouldn’t be doing. And the third column is for things that you can’t do. Someone did ask for a fourth column of things you love doing, but that’s not necessarily useful when you’re prioritising.
So this was really useful for me because it helps you map out where you’re spending your time and whether it’s on the right things. So when I first did it, the list of things I had in my shouldn’t be doing column was huge.
It really made me laugh when I was doing it because I was sort of writing down going, “Oh yeah, no, I shouldn’t be doing this.” And it helped me have conversations with some of my stakeholders to move things around, to maybe give them to someone else to do or to stop doing them completely.
What was interesting was that my “can’t” column, I can’t do this, was actually quite light because I’ve learnt quite a lot over the last probably six, seven years of where my strengths lie and where my weaknesses are and what I can outsource and what I can try and do myself. So, if it’s something that I can’t do, then I know I need to get another expert in that can help me do that.
Now, this works really well if you’ve got a big list and need to map out what’s stopping progress, because it makes it quite easy to see where you can delegate things and where you’re maybe spending time on things you shouldn’t be doing. But actually there’s a whole big list of stuff that isn’t on there that does need to get done. So, it’s a very helpful tool for making sure that you’re focusing on the right things for you to achieve your goals.
3. Conversation
You know, ask the questions. When someone’s asking you to do something, ask why the deadline is set. You know, there could be multiple requests coming in from the same place. Talk to that person. You know, if you’re asking you to do another thing, then it’s quite okay to say, look, you’ve asked me to do these five things already. I can do this other thing, but it means I can’t do this. Or where does it fit in the priority list of other things that are on this list that you’ve given me?
It’s okay to ask those questions and have that conversation because prioritization doesn’t have to be done alone. You might assume one thing’s more important than the other, but actually it’s the other way around for the stakeholder that you’re working with. So, it’s just important to have that conversation, have that discussion about deadlines and workload. It’s really important for us to make sure we don’t have that horrible feeling of being overwhelmed.
Do you have full clarity over your purpose? Do you often feel overwhelmed?
Now, in episode three of the first season of this podcast, I talked about how to stay focused. So, if you’re also looking at productivity or tips and tools to focus a bit more, then give that one a listen. I’ve popped a link in the show notes for you. The important thing to remember is that urgency is very subjective. What’s urgent to someone else won’t be urgent to you. And I always say that as soon as possible is not a deadline.
If I say to somebody, when do you need that by? And they say as soon as possible. I’m probably not going to do it. Because what’s as soon as possible to you is not as soon as possible to me. Because if I’ve got things that have a set deadline, they are going to come and be more important than the one that’s got an as soon as possible deadline.
So this is why it’s important to have those conversations. And it’s important to be really specific because that overwhelm and chaotic feelings stem from really a simple lack of clarity over time frame or something being misunderstood in terms of the needs that need to be met.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about culture and the employee life cycle. We often don’t consider the full life cycle of an employee when we look at culture in the organisation. And there are different things to talk about from start to finish. So I’ll share the employee life cycle. I’ll talk about where chaos can happen at the different stages. And we’ll look at how we can bring the culture to life at every stage as well.
Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. And you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So, please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me. Details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch. Thank you.
