Once you have a list of all your tasks, spend some time organizing and prioritizing them to ensure you do the right things at the right time. In this article, you’ll learn how to prioritize your tasks depending on the amount of attention they require and how you can use the Eisenhower principle to execute them correctly.
Different Types of Attention
Before prioritizing your tasks, let’s understand the different types of attention each task needs.
Proactive attention: It is the kind of attention that needs to be focused and sustained to complete the most difficult or complex tasks. Writing your thesis, sending project proposal emails, solving an academic problem, creating a youtube video are the tasks that require the most focus. To get these tasks done, you need to pay proactive attention.
Active attention: Active attention refers to the careful attention required to deal with daily repeated, moderate-level tasks. Most of the more minor day-to-day activities, like scheduling your meetings on google calendar, sending pending emails, sending important documents to colleagues, require active attention. Although you are not proactively crafting something, you still need some attention to get things done.
Inactive Attention: For relatively easy tasks that you can automate requires minimal attention. Cleaning spam from your mail, canceling draft emails, sending event invites to a list of your colleague, all these activities require your one click. For such a task, you don’t need proper active attention.
Prioritizing Tasks According to the Level of Attention
Prioritizing your tasks according to the level of attention they require is an excellent way to list down your daily activities.
All those tasks that require proactive attention are sure of high importance for you. It’s worth spending more time on these tasks so, they should be the ones with which you start your day. Also, try to allocate the most focused and fresh hours of your day to these activities. Grabbing a cup of coffee and throwing on headphones may help you stay proactive.
Tasks requiring inactive attention stand in between pro-active and inactive activities. You can allocate these hours during the day when you are neither pro-active nor inactive. If you have to call your friend, morning might not be the right time to do it. So, don’t waste your active hours on such activities.
You can schedule the tasks that require just your inactive attention to those hours in a day when you get into the lazy zone. This is the perfect time to check them off your to-do lists quickly. This way, you’ll be utilizing your lazy hours in doing something productive as the day progresses.
Let’s implement the above concepts to prioritize your to-do lists in todoist. For that, look at the list of 6 tasks that you have to do during the day.
The above list of tasks, writing the script, and filming the YouTube video requires most of your attention. So, click on both of these tasks and set the priority to one.
Click on three dots in front of each task.
Set the priority to the red flag.
You’ll see all tasks with priority one will move above all other tasks.
While meeting your boss and calling your friend, you don’t have to be proactive. However, you can’t do both when lazy and lethargic. So, set these tasks as your second priority by selecting the orange flag from priority settings.
Sending email invites to colleagues and transferring the data to MS-Excel are two tasks that require your inactive attention. So, set them to your priority tree by choosing the blue flag from the priority settings.
This is how you can prioritize the tasks in your to-do list by deciding what will be proactive, inactive, and active. Only giving the proper attention that fits each task attention requires you to meet your efficiency goals.
After prioritizing your daily tasks and understanding the attention each requires, it’s time to fit them into the actual workday. Eisenhower method is a well-known method that teaches how to deal with different types of routine tasks.
Putting Tasks in Your Daily Schedule Using Eisenhower Matrix
According to Eisenhower, you can divide all tasks into four different categories depending on how important and urgent they are. Then, you either do it instantly, delegate it, defer it or dump it altogether.
Let’s briefly discuss each of these categories:
Do it: It refers to the completion of a task that you can’t avoid. By knowing its importance and time sensitivity, you immediately complete it. Delegate it: You hand over the task to someone else, and they take care of it. Defer it: You want to do it yourself, however, later in the day. These are the tasks that you can put aside and schedule accordingly. Dump It: It refers to dumping those tasks which don’t worth your time, and these tasks are nothing more than a distraction.
Here’s how the Eisenhower method applies to tasks in todoist.
Filming the YouTube video is the first task, so you should do it first as it is your priority. Your next priority is writing a script, something that you can delegate to your writer. Similarly, you can delegate the task of transferring data to Excel.
Meeting your boss and calling your friends can be delayed, so defer these two tasks. Lastly, if you are short on time, you can dump sending email invites and do them later.
This is the most simple and effective way to manage your work routine properly. Otherwise, you may be super busy completing the tasks at the wrong time inefficiently other than being productive.
Get More Out of Your To-Do Lists
Whether you are a morning person or a night owl, filter out your most effective hours and allocate them to do tasks requiring proactive attention. Your priority should be not to let inactive and active tasks distract you from the proactive ones.
Start using productivity apps that help you perform better under pressure situations and stay disciplined.
