How To Get All Your Tasks Done On Or Before Their Due Dates.

 

I attended a workshop sometime last year on Local Education Sectoral Operational plan organised by UNICEF and learnt many strategies on how to get many tasks done at their appropriate time. Stick with me as I take you through getting your tasks done.

There are times we get stuck during the day with so many activities that seem impossible to handle. Our action plan at this point becomes impossible to implement. We feel pressured, less focused, and confused on which task to start with, while our productivity goes down.

If you have been wondering how to manage your time effectively and efficiently to get all your tasks done on or before their due dates, then hang on while I dish out the  Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle.

This principle helps you to prioritise your tasks based on how important and urgent they are. The key areas it touches are effectiveness, efficiency and productivity.

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

What are important tasks? Important tasks are activities that help you to achieve your goals.

What are urgent tasks?  These are tasks that need your immediate attention. 

Write all the activities you are to perform today in a book including the subtle ones that steal away your time.  Then categorise them under the following:

1. Important and Urgent: These are activities that will help you achieve your goals but have reached their dateline.  It also includes the ones you didn't foresee but require your attention e.g taking your sick partner to the hospital for treatment. Important and urgent tasks come with consequences if not attended to.

2. Important but not urgent: These are activities that are important but haven't reached their dateline yet. Schedule them and follow them accordingly to avoid pressure. 

3. Not important but urgent: These are tasks that won't help you to achieve your goals. These tasks most times come from other people and requires our immediate attention. You can decide to push the tasks forward or delegate somebody else to do them.  

4. Not important and not urgent:  These are activities that come to distract you from achieving your goals. 

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