How to Prioritize Tasks: Preventing Fire Drills

Last week I shared a list of triaging questions to ask yourself when you’re wondering, “How do I prioritize all of these tasks??”

Now let’s look at another stage of the prioritization process: prevention of fire drills. This calls for debriefing and learning from past experiences.

When you find yourself in situations like this where you feel inundated by requests seemingly due all that very day, it’s tempting to want to get out of this as quickly as possible and move on to the rest of your monster to-do list. But pausing to analyze how it got to this point will help you tremendously in the future and possibly prevent it from happening as often.

How did all of these items suddenly land in your lap with the exact same due date and importance level?

Project Management

Many times, these aren’t true emergencies. For example:

*someone forgot about something and suddenly remembered it

*someone didn’t track progress status and suddenly dug in to get answers

*a common deadline for multiple people approached, and everyone waited until the last minute to do the legwork

*a project that was assigned a long time ago sat on the backburner until the deadline rolled around

These are all project management-related fixes. Determining the deadline, mapping out the steps and each step’s deadline, plus completing status checks along the way can prevent a great deal of these so-called fire drills.

Your Industry Trend

Are a number of fire drills the result of the line of work you’re in? Are you in PR, IT support, healthcare or litigation? These fields quite often have unexpected situations arise. If that’s the case, it’s important to track how many hours on average you receive last-minute requests that must truly be completed that day – and allow for that amount of cushion within your daily schedule. For example, if you average up to three hours per day of last-minute requests (see last week’s tips to determine what’s truly due that same day), you should allow for that amount of time in between all of your meetings and “planned tasks” that are scheduled for the day.

Negotiating Time with Others

When you proceed through the task triaging process I detailed last week, you will also have the language to explain to anyone involved how the decision was made, which is a part of diplomatically negotiating time with others.

When teams and departments don’t sit down to examine their short- and long-term workloads, they often find themselves constantly up against the clock to meet deadlines. Operating this way is definitely not good for productivity levels, mental health, physical health and morale.

As I mentioned in last week’s blog about how to prioritize tasks, it’s important to have a conversation with your department and supervisor about how to make decisions about prioritization. It’s equally important to have a conversation about project management and workload management.

When you implement these preventive steps in task prioritization, you can help scale back the number of fire drills that occur.

For a step-by-step guide to prioritizing tasks and preventing fire drills, take a peek at The Inefficiency Assassin: Time Management Tactics for Working Smarter, Not Longer.