The Sisyphus Comments

Achieving Your Personal Goals – Part IV

In Achieving Your Personal Goals – Part III, I discussed the importance of affording the same degree of attention to your personal obligations as you afford to your professional obligations. I also discussed the importance of effectively managing the obligations on both sides of your life. Your homework assignment was to identify all of your to-do tasks and place them in one location – an “in-box of some sort depending on the Personal Information Management (PIM) system that have chosen to use.

Now that you have collected all of your life tasks into one central clearing point, the really hard work is about to begin. I imagine that you are looking a pretty significant stack of to-do items. You have probably come to the conclusion that there are not enough hours in a day for you to accomplish all the tasks in your in-box. It is obvious that some tasks are going to have to be deferred for a while so your next assignment is to prioritize you to-do tasks.

We are going to use a hierarchal approach to prioritizing your tasks. Picture an outline format like your English teacher encouraged you to use when you were developing a composition. In a standard outline format, the broadest categories of topics were designated using a Roman numeral (i.e. I., II., III) but it really doesn’t matter how you label your top level categories as long as you understand your system.

For the first step in our prioritization process, we are going to focus on separating our to-do tasks into three broad categories for the time being. Read each of your tasks and categorize them based on their degree of importance to your success. For instance, if a task is critical to your success, label it with an “A” and place it in a separate stack. Next, you may have a task that is important but not critical so label it with a “B” and place it in a second stack. Finally, you will have certain tasks that would be nice to do if you had some spare time but they will make a minimal contribution to your success so label these tasks with a “C” and place them in a third stack.

After you have completed this broad categorization of your tasks, you should have a much better handle on your situation. In the next article, we will talk about setting up a simple system to organize your tasks even further and so you can begin the process of achieving your personal goals.