Introduction
Do you have so much to do that it’s difficult to know where to focus? Whether you’re a small business owner, corporate leader, or a product manager at a startup, it’s difficult to manage competing demands, limited resources, and unexpected challenges. Juggling endless tasks and constant context-switching is exhausting, not to mention unproductive. Learning how to prioritize projects and workload can help you become more effective and optimize for what matters most. A lot of people struggle with this, but the good news is learning how to prioritize projects is a skill you can grow over time. A prioritization framework can be just the tool to help you get there.
Knowing what isn’t worthy of your time is just as important as knowing what is.
Understanding What to Prioritize
Understanding Goals
Effective prioritization is essential for accomplishing goals more quickly and keeping you focused on what matters. Prioritization frameworks can propel you forward with purpose and clarity. However, before you can begin to effectively implement a prioritization framework, understanding business goals is key. What are you trying to accomplish as a business in the next weeks, months, or year(s)? This can be based on any number of things, such as increasing profit, acquiring customers, improving a net promoter score (NPS), or even related to internal company issues, such as company culture.
There are popular goal-setting frameworks that can help with defining your key areas to focus. A few of my favorites are the following:
- Objectives and key results (OKRs)
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
- SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)
Spending adequate time understanding your goals and the milestones necessary to achieve them is a foundation that will enable you to use prioritization tools effectively.
All of the work you do may not be directly tied to your goals. It’s common to devote a percentage of your time to what can be referred to as “keep the business running” or KTBR work items. One example of a KTBR activity might be a technology upgrade that needs to be prioritized along with your goals.
Understanding Data
Before you can effectively use a prioritization framework, it is beneficial to get a grasp on the data that relates to your goals. Data will help you be more objective in the estimates you use in each framework.
Understanding Effort and Skills
Another key piece of the prioritization puzzle is the level of effort required to achieve an initiative. This includes the skill level of those who will be doing the work. Being able to estimate the size of the work will help you in your framework inputs.
When Can Using a Prioritization Framework Help?
A prioritization framework can be incredibly useful if you are struggling to know how to prioritize projects and workload. Here are some specific reasons to try a prioritization framework:
- If you want to be more decisive, a better decision-maker, or stay focused on fewer projects at a time.
- If you are often working too fast or too much to try to meet deadlines.
- If you want to get better at meeting your goals or business objectives.
- If you need to provide reasoning for what you prioritize or you present priorities to others, for example, your business leaders, board, or sponsors. Frameworks can be a helpful tool for helping others understand your point of view, as well as your reasoning for what did and did not get prioritized.
Best Prioritization Frameworks
There are many prioritization frameworks out there, often similar to one another with slightly different terminology or factors. They aim to allow you to be as objective as possible in determining where to focus your time. You can typically use a prioritization framework for initiatives and projects, tasks, and even ideas.
I encourage you to try each framework and decide what works best for you. Once you put these into practice you can quickly identify which framework is most beneficial to use in which situation. Each of them can help with objectively determining priorities, improving strategic decision-making, mitigating risks, and increasing both efficiency and effectiveness.
The Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix is a prioritization framework that measures urgency and importance. It is great to use for tasks on your weekly to-do list. If you have an agile team working in two-week sprints, it can be effective for prioritizing that work as well. Using 4 quadrants, you’ll plot how urgent and important you believe each task or initiative to be.
Urgent items need to be done right away, likely because there is a negative consequence for putting them off.
Important items are those that need to be done, likely because they have direct relevance to a goal or something critical to success.
Quadrant labels and explanations:
Quadrant 1 – Do: these are urgent and important. They need to be done before anything else.
Quadrant 2 – Schedule: these are not urgent and are important. They can be scheduled so as not to lose sight of them. Scheduling them can also help keep them from becoming urgent.
Quadrant 3 – Delegate: these are urgent but not important to achieving your goals. Someone needs to do them right away, but it doesn’t have to be you.
Quadrant 4 – Delete: these are not urgent or important for completing your goals. Consider these distractions and get rid of them.
The Impact Effort Matrix
The Impact Effort Matrix, also known As the value complexity matrix, is a prioritization framework that allows you to use 4 quadrants to plot the level of value an initiative will bring, in addition to the level of complexity of the initiative to implement.
Value, or impact: this refers to the value an initiative will have on both the business and your market, or customers. If you know something will be an immense benefit to customers, it probably has a high value.
Complexity, or effort: this refers to how difficult and time-intensive an initiative will be. Consider the resources you have available, your team’s skill level, and the amount of time involved to help you be as objective as possible regarding complexity. You can also consider things like costs and risks – whatever you include, use that for every idea, task, or initiative you plot.
Note: this is one of my personal favorites, and I use a spreadsheet instead of quadrants. A spreadsheet is a great alternative for several reasons:
- You can keep track of multiple categories of work all in the same place.
- You can quickly filter based on value or effort (or any combination of interest). There may be times when you have a short amount of time and want to accomplish something of little effort, or times when you need an initiative that will make a large impact. The sorting function is quicker than searching through multiple quadrants.
- You can be more detailed. The quadrant will get crowded with too many words, but adding a column to a spreadsheet is quick and simple.
If you want to see an example of a spreadsheet, add a comment below and I will be happy to provide one.
RICE Framework
The RICE framework is another prioritization framework that goes beyond task level and works well when you are making decisions about which ideas, initiatives, or projects may be best to focus on.
RICE is a calculation of Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort.
Reach: this refers to how many people will benefit from this initiative.
Impact: this refers to the level of impact the initiative will have on your customers.
Confidence: this is the level of confidence you have regarding the impact and reach scores. Consider how much data is available to back up the estimates you make.
Effort: this is an estimate of the amount of time that needs to be invested in the initiative and from whom.
RICE Score = Reach X Impact X Confidence / Effort
With each initiative scored, you have a much stronger idea of where your time is best spent. A higher score indicates that the initiative or project should have higher priority.
Conclusion
Prioritization is an ongoing activity crucial to your success. Learning how to prioritize projects and workload can be difficult, but it is an important skill to develop – particularly if you are a business owner, leader, or work in a startup environment. Prioritization frameworks can help you become a better decision-maker, meet deadlines, focus on goals, and explain your choices to others.
Don’t think these prioritization frameworks are enough to keep you running efficiently? Check out some of my favorite Free AI Tools for Business.