When faced with a time crunch at work or at home, whether it’s a major project deadline or just getting some things done quickly, prioritizing your objectives is the first thing that must be accomplished. Without the proper order of your tasks, it is likely that you will get bogged down in areas that are not the most important toward accomplishing your goal.

We’ve all seen this first-hand in the workplace: A team is assembled to deliver “something” to a client within a certain time frame. The objectives seem clear enough, but inevitably certain team members will get side-tracked and become fixated on details of the project that are of little or no consequence to the ultimate goals. Extra effort is then misguidedly dedicated to these areas to solve a “problem” or reach a “consensus”, when no real problem existed in the first place. As a result, mission-critical areas of the project get shorted on attention, things get missed and the end deliverable suffers. This cycle plays out within inefficient companies on a daily basis.

I’ve recently seen this phenomenon first-hand in the home, where it’s far less stressful, but just as entertaining to behold. Here’s a brief “dramatization” of how things work at my house:

Guests are coming by and we have only one hour to prepare for their arrival. One hour doesn’t allow for a full house cleaning, but it should generally be enough time to make things presentable, should you even wish to bother doing anything at all. But, it is only one hour, so you really have to prioritize your objectives if you wish to accomplish anything in that time. The following priority list would be pretty effective for us, if we ever chose to try it:

1) Clean the kitchen. Take care of any lingering dirty dishes, clean the counter tops and generally make the kitchen seem as though it could produce appetizing food. People will always end up in the kitchen at some point.
2) Straighten the family room. This is where you’ll be sitting and “entertaining” for the most part. Get rid of the kids’ toys, the dogs’ toys, fluff the pillows, etc.

3) Tidy the shared/guest bathroom. Make sure the bathroom guests will use is clean and ready for use. The necessary room will eventually come into play.

Independent studies have shown the above objectives to be comfortably achievable within one hour.
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Now, the same one-hour-until-guests-arrive scenario, but with our less efficient (and far more often-used) priority list:

1) Change the sheet in the baby’s crib. People might want to see the nursery, and it’s important that the crib sheet is crisp and freshly laundered.

2) Begin a load of laundry. This is important because we only have about 10 days worth of clean clothes remaining.

3) Clean the master bathroom. The master bath is practically inaccessible to guests, but it is nonetheless a bathroom and it should be cleaned when cleaning is to be done.
4) Straighten the master bedroom. Although guests rarely glimpse its glory, we spend quite a bit of time there, so let’s just knock that out - since we’re cleaning anyway…

This is around the time the guests arrive, comfortable in the knowledge that we didn’t bother to tidy up the house prior to their arrival. At home, poor prioritizing is funny. At work, it can hurt you and your company.

Tags: prioritizing objectives, setting and achieving goals, time management, work life balance

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