How To Prioritize Business Tasks

There are actually a number of ways you can prioritize business tasks. Among the more popular and more effective methods is the alphabetical priority list whereby your tasks are given a value between A and F. A being most important, paying your taxes for example and F being something unimportant like cleaning your phone receiver. Here’s how to prioritize effectively.


Step 1: Create your task list. It is important to break larger tasks into smaller steps if possible. For example paying your taxes might first involve calling your accountant or making a deposit into your Swiss bank account first. (Just kidding about the Swiss bank account.)

Step 2: Give all immediate tasks the value of A – F. Again A is the most important task or tasks and F is the least.

Step 3: Evaluate the tasks based on two criteria: how important are they and how urgent are they. For example if your taxes are due tomorrow then you need to get busy or you’re going to face financial penalties so the task is very urgent. However, calling a client and finalizing a large sale is very important to your business.

Step 4: For all tasks with the same value, prioritize them numerically. For example, maybe calling your accountant and making a large deposit in your Swiss bank account both have a value of B. Which is more important? The deposit quite likely because you don’t want your accountant to be complicit, so making the deposit would have a value of B1 and calling your accountant would have a value of B2.

Step 5: Your final step in creating your task list, particularly if your high priority list is extensive, is to run through your list again and see how you can re-arrange it so that some of the less important tasks get moved down the list to make room to spread out your high priority tasks.

For example if you have three A level tasks and only one F level task, perhaps you can move down a D or E level task and make room to spread out your high priority tasks. When in doubt, delegate to get all of those high priority tasks completed quickly