Prioritizing Tasks – What is a Waste of Time vs. What Isn’t

Sometimes prioritizing tasks is a challenge all on its own. What you may think is a fruitful task may actually be a waste of time in the long run. So how can you determine what is actually fruitful vs what is a waste of your time?

Measure Productivity

First, you must be clear on how you will measure it. If you don’t have a basis of what successful productivity looks like for you, determining if a task is fruitful or a waste of time is impossible. Take the following example:

Let’s say you are starting a business. You know when starting a business that establishing relationships is just as important as the actual revenue you make. If your first month’s goal is to get ten email captures a day, a fruitful task in this situation would be anything that will aid you in getting those ten daily email captures.

So if you had the choice of spending 30 minutes having lunch with an existing client vs spending a half an hour making sure your website has an add-on for capturing email addresses, which would be fruitful and which is a waste of time?

Both tasks are important in their own way and have an impact on your business. However, one has a strong impact on your goal for your business. Your goals will grow and evolve as your business does.

Prioritizing and Clarify Goals

When measuring whether a task is fruitful or not, the next thing to do is be sure to establish clear goals and prioritize tasks based on what will have the most direct impact on the goal you have set. Let’s take the same two tasks as above, for an established business, as an example:

For someone who has a well-established client list continuous follow-up and relationship building is a very big part of their established business. So in this scenario, the lunch with a client would be a fruitful task vs spending a half an hour making sure your website has an add-on for capturing email addresses when this task can be delegated out to an employee (because hopefully if you are in the position to prioritize a lunch meeting, you have people helping you with the workload).

This is just the tip of the iceberg on prioritizing tasks, however. What further effective ideas do you have when prioritizing tasks? We would love to hear from you so please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

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