Make the Challenge More Efficient

“Make The Challenge More Efficient”

Most people are aware that if conflicting priorities are not under control the type of mess it can produce in the future.  Some things won’t be finished, some are pushed back, some are late or rushed, and the quality suffers.  With prioritization, a leader must use strategic thinking, knowledge, long range vision and business objectives to determine which tasks are most important at any given moment. Those are the tasks that receive more time, energy and attention.  A leader’s focus should be on what is important at the expense of lower value activities.  Prioritizing is all about making decisions and choices of what to take on now and what to put aside or delegate.  Prioritizing effectively means recognizing what is important and seeing the difference between the levels or urgency. And, it means recognizing that at any moment your top priority is supplemented by a new and more urgent priority! This essay didn’t start out being a model for someone to refer to but after thinking about the task at hand, a model is exactly what is missing.

If you are good at what you do on the job, if you are a committed and conscientious professional, two things will be true:

(1) you’ll have a continuous influx of projects with more to do, and

(2) you’ll want to do everything to the best of your ability.

This is exactly when the vicious cycle kicks in.

In the beginning, a few projects turn into an overwhelming number of projects with overlapping demands and conflicts. Then the ball is dropped with scheduling and critical projects making deadlines seems larger than life and almost to the point of being inflexible.  Starting a new week comes with routine responsibilities plus new deadlines and meetings but at the same time the projects from last week are still looming and need to be complete.  At this point, there is strain mounting with colleagues and creating anxiety which can affect communication and concentration resulting in errors and creating more complications. If you didn’t get anxiety from reading this, then everything must be under control but for most people this is a very familiar scenario and it doesn’t have to be that way!  Managing Multiple Projects, Competing Priorities & Tight Deadlines without the burnout, stress and backlog scenarios can be achieved with practice, but how?

The first thing that needs to be accomplished is gaining control of yourself.  We all get into bad habits that are hard to kick, so being able to identify routine habits that are continuously robbing you of precious time and effectiveness is key.  Take control of your mind and get back into the game of being efficient by gaining a sense of where stress is coming from, and getting a firm grasp on how it’s being exacerbated by your thinking and behavior.  Once there is an understanding to what is creating the stress create a new way of thinking.  Thing won’t always go exactly to plan and there are going to be plenty of ups and down and complete failure.  The key is to keep moving forward by acknowledging what caused the success or failure and how to change it for the future.