I have been accused of being ‘organised’ as if it were a disease! I will confess to a degree of this, along with a preference for structure and planning. Indeed, despite the laughter of my kids, I even admit to putting things into the dishwasher in a certain way too.
However, many years ago I heard a story about a simple idea that I believe is very effective. Like many people, I keep a ‘to do’ list of tasks and actions etc. I had been doing this with reasonable affect for some time and was generally good at getting through them. One day, I heard of a senior American executive being advised to put a priority number against each item each day. And that the tasks are then tackled in the priority order. Surely the act of numbering was only what we do subconsciously anyway!? What I found, was that it was more difficult than I thought to stick to the priority of doing the important things first, largely because they were usually the most difficult and most challenging. That having been said, it really does work. I have a 1 – 3 grading [1 being highest], that IF I follow it, it does make me more effective. As a consequence, it does mean that I close most weeks with a bunch of priority 3 tasks unresolved and I occasionally make a point of turning them into priority 1’s just to clear them, or drop them off the list.
I have heard of other people who have far more sophisticated methods, but as Sir John Harvey Jones once said about strategy, the most effect are the ones that you can use! So this is a simple idea and though not always the easy, it is an effective and useful tool.
