Do you know what your critical tasks — at work, in relationships, online, with your kids — are? If not, then you may find yourself overwhelmed with too many options and paralyzed about what to do next. That leads to procrastination, inefficiency and bad choices. However, clearly defining your critical tasks can cut through all that.
What are critical tasks?
I ran across the term ‘critical tasks’ in a recent edition of Harvard Business Review. I may not be using it the way the article’s authors intended, but my definition is useful. Your critical tasks are the handful of key tasks that produce the most value and greatest results in a given area of your life. They are the 20 percent of tasks that create the 80 percent of value. And when faced with too many things to do, too many things to read, too many distractions tugging at you, those critical tasks are where you should be putting your time and energy. In most areas of your life you need, at most, three or four of these.
Let me give you an example. In blogging I’ve got basically four critical tasks:
- Create unique, useful content for readers.
- Spread the word about that content through my social media connections (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).
- Improve the blog design in ways that encourage readers to engage with it more (for example, adding the ’subscribe’ link to the bottom of every post).
- Comment and participate on other blogs in a way that provides value and reinforces the MarkTzk brand.
There are many other things I could be doing for the blog. I could be adding more widgets and plug-ins, tweaking the design, adding to my blogroll, and more. And there’s nothing wrong with doing those things, provided I’ve taken care of my critical tasks. Right now, I’m writing this, because writing posts is a critical task for this blog. I’m not trying to get through the 338 unread blog posts in Google Reader, because that’s not a critical task.
Make sense? You can do this same kind of critical task analysis for any area of your life — relationships, work, hobbies, you name it. Try writing your critical tasks down and put that list where you will see it. (People who work with me will attest that my critical tasks at work are written on the white board in my office, a constant reminder of priorities when the to-do gets stuffed and interruptions picks up.)
How do you keep yourself focused on what’s important? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I like your four critical tasks for blogging - apart from # 3 I’ve got the same ones. I think it is very important to concentrate on the things which are really essential.
At work (and home) much of what I encounter (or encounters me) engages me with what feels like equal weight – mentally I assign everything an A-1 priority.
Keeping focused on what matters most, whether blogging or running my firm, is constantly challenging. I ‘know’ my respective roles. I think I know what matters most. I’m clear on my agreements and commitments and which 20% of the activities produce which 80% of the results.
Problem is, I wake up, get dressed, and it’s all downhill from there.
To help me see when my activity is high but my accomplishment is low (and to help get out of the mental ditch I fall in) I subscribed to Harvest’s time tracker app after searching and trying out time tracker/productivity apps. Harvest organizes my stuff into clients, projects, and tasks. It does way more, too, and it also supports multiple users, but for now its just me.
JSCO, Marketing Strategy, Portfolio Excellence, and Personal are my “clients.” JSCO’s “projects” are Administration, Building Business Plan, and Meetings. Marketing Strategy’s “projects” are Client Relationship Management, Leveraging Existing Assets, Planning, and Rainmaking (Adding and Keeping Assets under Management). Portfolio Excellence has a sole “project”: Investment Committee. The Personal client’s “projects” are meals and breaks and personal stuff.
So whatever I’m doing, I just click the task in Harvest associated with the project and client and the stopwatch starts rolling. When I switch off to subsequent task (hopefully I’ll remember to click that task), the first timer stops and the second timer starts. A desktop widget makes tracking easier and Twitter enables tracking on the hoof.
If forget to stop the stopwatch and shut down my laptop, Harvest sends me an email the next morning telling me I left yesterday’s timer still running, duh!
Oh, Harvest does have this one flaw: if I forget to click the Harvest task when I start working …like writing comment to Mark’s blog…which I started some ¾ of an hour ago. Or was it just 15 minutes ago?
For me anyway, that’s how my stopwatch rolls.
Hmmm, I like the concept. It sounds like something I need to do on several fronts. One of the things I do now is operate off of a spreadsheet and color code the tasks based on priority level. The thing is, those levels often change based on any new projects that come my way or new initiatives that I suddenly want to launch. You hit the nail on the head with the distractions though. I can lose three hours of a day on distractions alone. In some cases, my most critical task could be to close my office door, ignore the phone and limit e-mail.