Shawn’s Friday Five: Five ways to improve your productivity.

In this weeks edition of Shawn’s Friday Five I wanted to provide you with five ideas you can use immediately to prioritize your priorities. Consider the following five points to help you clarify what is a true priority, and where to start.

1. Urgency: Not all priorities have the same degree of urgency (despite what others may tell you!). Determine the degree of urgency attributed to each priority to provide a starting point for your approach to dealing with the issues or tasks before you.

2. Necessity: What of your priorities is a true priority? By that I mean, which actually serve to help you achieve your goals? It’s easy to identify priorities that are nothing more than a time dump.

3. Impact: What is the impact completing the task will have on you, your business or your family? Tasks that have a significant impact are often of greater priority due to the resulting change or influence they will have.

4. Outcomes: Forget the methodology, it’s the outcome that matters! The faster and more effectively you can reach your desired outcome(s), then the better off you are. I have a green belt in Six Sigma, but find that the training has not been that useful for one simple reason, speed is more important than any predetermined process.

5. Intuition: That’s right, plain old intuition. I have found more times than not I can rely on intuition to help me prioritize my tasks.

So if you are buried in “things” to do, try measuring them against these five criteria. You can apply a simple scoring system to determine which are your true priorities, and where to start.

Good luck!

© Shawn Casemore 2012. All rights reserved.