Prioritization 101: How to Decide What to Do and When to Do It

Speaker A: Welcome to the Nurse Leader Network podcast with your host, Chris Racinos. Wherever you're going on your Nurse Leader journey, we're here to help you get there. So we all have been there. You wake up, you get to work and you're like, where do I start? What is the first thing that I need to work on? I have this list of, you know, a million things on my to do list, and I just kind of already feel overwhelmed, right? It's like 7:30 or 8:00 clock in the morning and I already have this sense of overwhelm because I'm trying to figure out how to get it all in, how do I fit this all in, how do I prioritize this? So today's episode, we're going to talk about how to prioritize. You would think that we should know, right? We're humans. Every single day, we have to prioritize. But there are actually some strategies that you can employ that are going to help you get things off your to do list faster and help you make progress quickly on the things that you are trying to make progress on. Now, today's episode may be applied at work, but it can be applied to every aspect of your life. So I highly recommend you take the same strategy and use that to tackle any type of priorities that you need to get done. To start, when you are looking at setting priorities for what it is that you're going to be doing, it's going to be important that your to do list is not compartmentalized. Meaning, okay, I have all of these priorities for work or to have emails, I have reports, I have things that are due, I have performance evaluations that I need to get done. And then in your personal life, maybe I have exams or tests or I have things that I have to do with family or friends. All of these other personal things that I have to get done. Maybe have some volunteering to do, whatever it looks like. But you want to have all of your to dos, all of your tasks in one area that is going to give you the full scope of what it is that you need to get done. Because we all have the same 24 hours in the day and we need to be able to fit in what is priority based on those days. So we want to include all of those things from our personal and professional to do list in one single task list or one single to do list. Okay, so now we have done our, um, written, we've written it all down. We have everything on that to do list of everything we need to do, right? The Dry cleaning, whatever it is that you need to get done. Now, we need to look at figuring out what of those things on your list is important. We have to understand what some of our goals are. So when you are looking at time management strategy, right, we're looking at how to make sure we can get in what we need to get in, get the important things done, not have important things fall off our plate. We have to look at what the goals are that we are trying to achieve. We need to understand our long term goals and we need to understand our short term goals. And I do have an episode where I talk about goal setting, so I would refer you back to that episode to check out and, uh, understand how to do goal setting. But the reality is we need to make sure that we have long term goals and then we have short term goals that are going to lead us to those long term goals. Right? So for example, when we have a yearly goal, let's say for a year from now, you're trying to buy a house, let's say a year from now, you're trying to have change something on one of your units. You, um, want to break that down into monthly goals. And then from there you're going to have to do items that are maybe weekly, daily, that are going to lead you to those monthly goals. So that'll help you prioritize, right? So it's going to start with, we have our long term year goal or longer, we're going to deconstruct that into a monthly to do list. And then from that that's going to direct our weekly tasks. And then from there we're going to determine what our daily priorities are based on that. Okay. So now we've gone through and created, right, our goals. We understand where we're trying to get with whatever it is. Right? It's again, these are going to be goals in your personal life and goals in your professional life. I talk about this in another episode, so you can go ahead and listen to that. Once we have determined those things, you need to assign deadlines to those. So even if you don't have a true deadline, let's say, for example, one of the things that I need to do is I need to go grocery shopping. I don't really have. I guess my true deadline would be when I have zero food in my house. But you know what, I could go grocery shopping today, I could probably go tomorrow, but I want to assign a deadline for that date again. Maybe you have a paper you want to look at what the deadline is for. That Paper at school or something like that. Maybe you have something at your job, right? You have a report that's due or you have, um, some type of planning meeting that needs to get done. You want to create deadlines, even if they're not formally required. You should be creating these deadlines because that is going to help you create some time sensitivity around these so that you can get them done. Once we've done that, okay, so we've broken it down. Our goal. We have looked at what tasks need to be done for each of these things. We need to then again look at the deadlines. And we are then going to reflect on Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven't checked out the book, I recommend you checking out the book. And he talks about prioritizing based on the importance of something and the urgency of something. So we now understand urgency, right? We just did our timelines. We now understand importance because we've looked at our goals. Do the things that are on our current to do list fit into reaching one of our goals? This is how you're going to strategize it. So you're going to look at your list if you have something that is urgent and important. Urgent, meaning I've looked at my deadline. The deadline is quickly approaching. Important, meaning this is crucial to me completing those goals that I am attempting to complete. Those are the tasks that you want to do first. All right? So those things that are urgent, right? Deadline and important going to get us to a goal. Those are the tasks we want to get done first. You're going to sit down and look at your prior list and say, that is what I want to get done first. The next are going to be the things that are important, but they're not urgent, right? I need to do these to get to my goal, right? I want to keep my job. So I got to check my emails. Uh, but it's not urgent. I don't have to get back to these emails based on this deadline. For those type of things, you're going to block off the time in your calendar without interruption, right? So those are going to be the times where you're like, okay, listen, no kids, no dog, no, you know, interruptions from people at work. I have this time blocked off and I have to get this action done. The next set of things are going to be things that are urgent, but they're unimportant. Okay? So these are the things that, yep, they have a deadline, but guess what? They're not getting me to my goal. In those cases, you need to delegate. You are going to delegate, delegate, delegate those tasks to somebody else. Okay? So that is the things that you need to take off your to do list and you're delegating those somebody else. And if they're not urgent or important, take it off your to do list. Sometimes we just have things on our to do list that just don't have any place being there. They're there because somebody told us that they're. But guess what? It ain't important. I'm not going to reach any goals. And it's not urgent. It has no deadline or the deadline is like, no. Um, then those are just things that just don't need to get done, right? Those are the things that linger on our to do list and they just make us crazy. So those are some of the strategies. You can also do another strategy. It's called the most important tasks MIT methodology. And these are from things that are going to be like urgent requests, right? So some. We all know it, right? We have sometimes, like a boss will come up and be like, hey, we have this emergency. You got to get blah, blah, blah, m done. That's going to be just having a separate list of three main focus items that need to get done that day. So you're going to ask yourself what tasks, out of all the tasks that you have, have the biggest impact on your end result? What can you get done today to get closer to the goal? Like if it cannot get done today, it doesn't go on the today's to do list. So again, it needs to be reasonable. You need to be able to get it done today. Those are the top three highlighted items. Usually it's something that you can do shortly and get it done today so that you can get closer to whatever goal you're going. Now the biggest thing that you can do really around making sure that you are not having these priorities kind of clash with each other, that you can actually get them done, is you want to make sure that you really are setting aside focused time where you're away from distractions. So sometimes that looks like letting people know, hey, I'm not going to be available this afternoon. Hey, I'm not going to be available this amount of time. Sometimes it looks like getting out of your routine environment. So everybody's always coming to your office. Maybe you want to go do the work somewhere else. Um, maybe it looks like I work from home. So for me, sometimes I need to get out of my house and I need to just go somewhere else and do the work um, so whatever that is, it looks like turning off your email, turning off your phone, and just getting in the zone so that you can get those priorities done. Sometimes our to do lists are really long and they're just too burdensome. And so sometimes we need to look at prioritizing the tasks that we can get done quickly. Right. So there's kind of like a rule of thumb where, for example, let's say I'm going through my emails. That's one of the tasks that I have to do. On those emails, I need to decide am I going to respond, am I going to act or not. If I can respond in under a minute, I'm going to send the response. If it's going to require something detailed, I'm going to table it for later. And that's when I'm going to do some larger work around the emails. And so if there's something that's asking for a report that's going to take longer, it's going to be tabled. And I'm going to calendar versus answering right then and there in the moment. The important things to remember around the prioritization is once we've identified what those prioritizations are and we've identified when they need to be done. You need to make sure you're calendaring them. You need to make sure that you have looked at. So I have a journal where each day I put what is going to be my top, uh, priorities for that day and how I'm going to reach them, what tasks need to be done to, you know, reach them. And then I go back and I look at them. You also want to make sure you're setting boundaries again. These are going to require conversations with your team or with your family to say, hey, I have this item I got to get done. I'm going to need you to respect that boundary. I'm, um, focused on this and I will definitely speak with you and get back to you at a later time, but I just need you to not disturb me for this amount of time. So those are some quick tips around how to prioritize. I promise you, if you sit down and take the time to create these to do lists based on the information I just gave you and calendar it in based on how urgent and how important it is, you will be well on your way to, to getting things off your to do list, to becoming more productive, and to getting rid of the burnout and the burden that we all have from having these really long to do lists. I hope this was helpful. We'll see you again next time.