At a time when companies are urging everyone to do more with less, most recruiters have to-do lists so long they’d make the most organized person wilt. Each day dawns with reqs to fill, interviews to schedule, and resumes to be screened — to say nothing of the emails from candidates, messages from hiring managers, and pings from coworkers, who all need answers now. It’s hard to know where to begin.
If you want to stay sane, you have to prioritize. Ruthlessly. That means, yes, you have to figure out what needs to be done and what you can delegate or ditch. The good news is that when you focus on what matters most, you’ll not only hit goals faster but also make room in your life for . . . your life.
Where’s the best place to start? Check out these five ways to begin prioritizing now.
1. Get clear on your goals
Most talent professionals outline their yearly goals in annual performance reviews. If you haven’t done this already, it’s a good idea to do it now. To prioritize effectively, you need a clear idea of what you’d like to accomplish over the next year.
Let’s say, for example, you’d want to increase the diversity of your new hires by 10%. To hit this goal, you may want to establish relationships with your company’s ERGs, plan outreach to HBCUs, and conduct Boolean searches to find candidates in underserved communities. After identifying what you need to do, you can break it down into quarterly, monthly, and weekly tasks.
By keeping your eyes on the prize, you’ll have a better sense of what needs to be prioritized.
2. Write down all of your tasks
Next, write down all of your tasks. Literally, everything you need to do. This can include:
Daily tasks: meetings, updates, and emails you need to send or answer
Weekly tasks: deadlines you need to meet on projects and presentations, as well as milestones you need to reach on long-term projects
Monthly or quarterly tasks: actions you need to take to finish longer-term projects
Don’t forget to include personal tasks too, such as running to the dry cleaners or taking the cat to the vet. It helps to have a clear idea of what you need to fit in each day.
3. Choose a prioritization technique that works for you
This leads us to the burning question: Which tasks should you tackle first?
Turns out, the business world offers a dizzying number of prioritization techniques. Here are a few of the most common:
Eat the Frog Method: This one gets its name from a quote attributed to Mark Twain, “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning.” In other words, complete your most challenging and important tasks first. You can do this by identifying the task (or tasks) that you’ve been avoiding or that require the most effort. Then do them before you start any other work.
ABCDE Method: The ABCDE Method was popularized by Brian Tracy in his book, Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less. In this method, you create five categories and assign each task on your list to a category.
- A tasks are the things you must do
- B tasks are things you should do
- C tasks are nice-to-dos
- D tasks are tasks you should delegate to someone else
- E tasks are tasks you should eliminate
If you’re not in the habit of delegating or eliminating tasks, now is a great time to start.
The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: Dwight D. Eisenhower was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in World War II and the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. His organizational skills were legendary and, to make important decisions quickly, he devised this method to help.
The matrix involves organizing tasks into four quadrants, based on whether they are: important, urgent, important and urgent, or neither. The “important and urgent” tasks need to be completed immediately. The “important but not urgent” tasks need to be completed but not now. “Not important but urgent” tasks can be delegated. And the last group of tasks — “not urgent and not important” — can be eliminated.
4. Focus on one task at a time
After you’ve picked the method that works best for you and prioritized tasks that need to be tackled first, you need to do them one at a time. In this age of distraction, it can feel nearly impossible to focus on just one task. But if you want to be a deft prioritizer, this is a skill that’s crucial to master.
The Cleveland Clinic has found that only about 2.5% of people can multitask effectively. For the remaining 97.5% — which is to say, most of us — trying to do too much at once results in poor quality work.
When you focus on just one task, you can complete it in less time and get more done. One way to do this is by trying time chunking, which is when you set aside a certain amount of time to complete each task.
You could, for example, block out 25 minutes to read resumes, take a five-minute break, and then block another 25 minutes to return emails from candidates. Schedule these time chunks into your calendar throughout the day. And be sure to leave room in your calendar for any unexpected tasks that may come up.
5. Learn how to say “no”
Perhaps the most important word you can learn to say, in any language, is “no.” For some people, this can be a big lift. But there are graceful ways to say no, while still staying focused on your goals.
In her three-minute LinkedIn Learning course, Career Wellness Nano Tips, Shadé Zahrai offers the following scenario: Imagine your manager comes to you and says, “I need you to prepare the agenda for the team offsite this afternoon.” Instead of replying, “I have absolutely no time for that,” you can say: “Of course.” But then ask your manager, “Could you help me prioritize my project list?” Take your boss through everything on your plate and ask what they’d like you to deprioritize so that you can complete the new task.
“When my clients have done this,” Shadé says, “their boss has said, ‘Oh, you’re at capacity. Don’t worry, I’ll find someone else.’” Or they’ve reduced the employee’s workload to fit in the new task. Either way, Shadé adds, it’s a “respectful and highly effective” way to say no.
Final thoughts: Prioritizing is a major stress-buster
With so much coming at you every day, it may seem impossible to prioritize at all, let alone ruthlessly or effectively. So, let’s pause, take a breath, and consider why it’s so important.
When you prioritize, you’re better able to produce high-quality work and achieve your goals. But just as importantly, you can lower stress and nip burnout in the bud. Work-life balance is much more achievable when you can put work aside at the end of the day, instead of thinking about the 4,000 things you still need to do.
Author and psychologist Michelle Rozen said it best in a recent article on LinkedIn.
“When you prioritize effectively,” she writes, “you feel more in control.”
