When practicing multitasking its very easy to have nothing done at the end of the day. Also as we grow in career it is very essential that we don't get bogged down into a single focus area which means we are into a number of initiatives which require attention. The general guidance of prioritizing follows the 2 step approach.
1. Break all the work we do into a simple 4 quadrant Urgent/important. Yeah everything has a 4 quadrant but this one is specially interesting because it shows a few key dimensions
- How much of the work on a daily basis is tactical vs strategic. Everything in urgent-important is tactical and in no-urgent-important is kind of strategic where we are preparing for future.
- How much are we successful in delegating. How many tasks do we have which are urgent but not important and still we end up doing rather than finding a delegate.
- How to say no to few things. These are the not-urgent and not-important ones
Very critical to frequently break our work into these four quadrants and keep analyzing the results.
2. For Urgent-Important use a wonderful tool called as "Pomodoro". This is a simple 25 minutes timer which helps focus into achieving a measurable outcome in 25mins. There are no ifs and buts in this task it is well cut out and the result is very clearly defined. We may need a Pomodoro to break an unclear area into clear tasks but very worth it.
Once you do Pomodoro, it is very startling to figure that something that can have progress in 25mins is so often procrastinated and never achieved.
Further for "Not urgent, important" ones also reserve at least 2 Pomodoro's a day so that you can dwell on it and the back of the mind is working on it.
Overall in a life busy with meetings, if we could achieve 4-6 Pomodoro's per day its a huge completion ratio.
