In work we always have a big pile of tasks to do. You finish 1 task, and another 5 pop up. How will you ever get it all done? Here’s the secret. You won’t, and you’ll never need to.

This past quarter, my team had a lot of different priorities to focus on, but because we’ve put in the time to understand the urgency and importance of each task, and built an environment where people feel safe to ask about that, we never felt like we were overwhelmed. Everything was prioritized so that we knew what to focus on first, and we were prepared to add any surprises into our prioritized list of tasks.

Urgency

To figure out what is urgent, consider what deadlines are looming or if something has come up unexpectedly. If you want to further subdivide the surprises, consider if the surprise is that something is functioning in a less than ideal way, or if it’s completely broken and no work can progress.

Importance

To figure out what is important, go back to you team or your company’s strategic objectives. Does completing this task align with our current goals or reduce our risk? If the task only tangentially aligns with strategic priorities, it may be a little less important than something that absolutely has to happen for strategic objectives to be met.

Putting it together

Now it’s time to think about the combination of the 2 factors.

Urgent and Important

This is a fire. Do it now.

It’s important to recognize that this is the baseline for a lot of people. This style of work is very reactive, and if you stay in this zone, you won’t be able to make things better for yourself or your team. If you can hand off some of these smaller fires to people on your team, that can free up some space for you to move into a more proactive style of work.

During times of organizational change, sometimes you’ll have to let the smaller fires burn for a while so you can fight the bigger ones.

During this past quarter, my team was working on 2 main projects, and also needed to support 2 other teams with 1 major task each. In order to prioritize the work, we started with which tasks were important. The only problem is that every task was related to the company’s strategic objective. Next we thought about the urgency. Our team would be able to start our own tasks immediately at the beginning of the quarter, but the support tasks for the other teams wouldn’t be ready for us to work on until later in the quarter. Based on the urgency and importance, we were able to schedule the support tasks towards the end of the quarter so we could do our tasks in a focused way.

We also engaged in a little horse trading. We went to one of the teams that needed support and asked them to apply some ML tools to our tasks to identify the most valuable parts of our tasks to focus on. It was an easy sell, considering their help would allow us to get to helping them faster.

Urgent but not Important

It’s timely, but it’s not the most important thing for you to focus on right now. Consider where it falls in your list of priorities based on the potential outcomes. If you don’t have capacity for it, does it need to be done at all? Sometimes these tasks are just distractions, but they don’t really need to be done. If it does need to be done quickly, but isn’t a strategic priority, could you delegate this task to someone else on your team to handle?

Towards the end of last quarter, we realized that one of the teams no longer needed our support. The support tasks were still urgent because they were coming up in our schedule. But they were no longer critical to the success of the company’s strategic objectives and wouldn’t enable anything new for the other team. We had a quick chat and decided that the tasks we had planned 3 months ago, didn’t matter anymore and we agreed not to do them.

Not urgent but important

Remember all those fires you’ve been putting out? When you get some breathing room, you can take some time to think about what’s causing them. Are there processes that aren’t serving the team, and could be improved to prevent this from happening in the future?

The “not urgent, but important” category is where you can be proactive and invest in the future. You want to try to create as much space as possible to work in this space. My main takeaway from High Output Management by Andy Grove, was that a manager’s main job is to improve the leverage of the people on their team. The book starts with a preface about how this new “email” thing is going to revolutionize business.

On my team, we try to carve out time to do more of this “investment” style of work. We’ll update our SOPs based on new weird situations we run into, but the real investment work comes from experimentation with new tools. Just like they said email would revolutionize business in the 80s, we’re always looking for the next thing that will revolutionize the way we work. We’ve had people on our team experiment with new Google Sheet formulae, Regex, Jira for product management, SQL, Python, project management methodologies, QA processes, you name it. These experiments have been hugely beneficial for morale, productivity, and the professional development of the team. Compared to a couple of years ago, our processes are drastically different and far more efficient because we take the time to say “how do we make this work suck less?”

Not urgent not important

These tasks are distracting you and your team from doing what’s important. Tasks in this category aren’t making the progress necessary for achieving your strategic objectives, and they’re not making work easier for your future selves. They can go on the backlog if they might have strategic value in the future, but they will be low priority unless something changes. Anything else doesn’t need to be done.

We regularly go through our backlog of tasks to see if our list of priorities has changed. There’s always something we thought was a good idea last time that’s not worth doing now.

Important reminder

Just because you’ve prioritized your team’s work and you’ve found that some tasks are not going to be done, doesn’t mean you can just forget about them. Remember to manage your stakeholders! In the DACI framework, go to your contributors and see if they can Actively Commit to the ordered list of priorities, check in with the approver to see if they like the course of action, make sure everyone who needs to be informed was informed, then you can forget about it. Remember that you don’t want to create open loops.