Custom Task Priorities

Jiri Novotny — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:47:07 +0000

How do you prioritize your tasks?

Do you use High – Medium – Low prioritizing, or do you use something more useful?

“What? There is something else besides High/Medium/Low? Nobody told me!”

Well, with Swift To-Do List, you can create your entirely own custom priorities. Even all the inbuilt priorities are fully customizable. In fact, you could have just 1 priority called “Octogoat” (8-legged goat) and that would be it. (Yeah, this particular prioritizing system probably wouldn’t increase your productivity! :-)

All you have to do is to use menu Manage – Priorities:

(And in case you are not using Swift To-Do List, as you read on, you might still find this article quite useful.)

Why does prioritizing matter?

Prioritizing is very important, because it help you fight off procrastination. By not having your tasks prioritized, you risk decision paralysis, which is one of the leading causes of procrastination. Since you are not sure what to do (e.g. many items are very important), you will tend to do something completely else, usually not important at all (e.g. checking social media and new sites, checking email, cleaning and re-organizing your office, etc.)

Alternative prioritizing methods

“High/Medium/Low” might not be particularly useful to you either, because it is vague. I bet that you could find at least 5 reasons why any particular task on your to-do list should be High priority – or Low priority. Oftentimes, you will have so much High priority tasks that you will be left clueless as what to actually work on next.

However, there are more useful prioritizing systems, such as One Minute To-Do List (which I think is pretty good) or Stephen Covey’s 4-Quadrants. It is also curious that GTD (Getting Things Done methodology) has no prioritizing, just contexts (which, in my opinion, is suboptimal for most). You can also use my own prioritizing system, which you will learn in this post.

Most prioritizing methods are either based on Importance, or Urgency. I think that prioritizing by Urgency is far better, because there are…

3 reasons why prioritizing by importance is WRONG

There are at least three serious problems with prioritizing by importance:

First, if you ignore urgent (but unimportant) tasks, you will be anxious, stressed and less effective. Urgent tasks are like swords hanging over your head, causing you stress. Urgent tasks should be always handled first, as they are time-sensitive. When urgent tasks are not attended timely, then in many cases, it can have long-term negative consequences. But even more importantly, almost invariably, avoiding or postponing urgent tasks places an emotional and mental burden on you.
Second, almost all tasks can be classified as important for one reason or another. You can try this right now – pick any task from your list- and then try to think up of at least 2-3 reasons why it is important. Usually, you will not have any problem coming up with the reasons, even if the task is of a very low priority. Too many tasks get classified as highly important- the prioritizing thus becomes useless, as it’s impossible to distinguish what really matters. (If everything is important, nothing really is.)
Third, many tasks which are not important still need to be done. Without doing seemingly unimportant tasks, such as paperwork, computer and office maintenance, it would be soon impossible to do the important tasks. The wheels would get stuck.

In light of this, the urgency-based prioritizing approach of the One Minute To-Do List method seems very solid. But still, you don’t have to use it as it is. You could take it and customize it to suit your needs. Or, you could use…

My better prioritizing system

I’ve been developing the following prioritizing method for quite some time. It will be part of my own productivity/organizing methodology which I am currently developing. Think of this as a little preview – the final system will be have much more depth to it.

I’ve been also testing it extensively on myself, and so far, the results are great.

My prioritizing method is urgency based.

The priorities are as follow:

Urgent
Current Focus
Do Soon
Do Later
Maybe
Info/Reference

And here are quick description of the priorities. The individual priorities are for tasks that you…

Urgent: Absolutely must do today. If necessary, you would stay late at work to get these done.

Current Focus: Want to do today.

Do Soon: Want to do this/next week, and even today if given the opportunity.

Do Later: Want to do eventually, but don’t have to worry about now at all.

Maybe: Are not yet sure if you want to do at all.

Info/Reference: This is for non-tasks. Items with this priority are not actionable at all.

At any point, try to have no more than 5 Urgent tasks, no more than 10 Current Focus tasks and no more than 20 Do Soon tasks. The other priorities can have unlimited number of tasks.

You can easily apply this system with the Manage Priorities window. Once applied, it looks like this:

And have fun with it, if you want! For example, when I was submitting a support ticket to Dreamhost, I noticed I could choose priority too, and they have funny options like “OMG CRITICAL EMERGENCY! PEOPLE ARE DYING!” So albeit my system works pretty well, feel free to choose names that make sense to you.

Have you already customized your priorities? What priorities do you use?

Custom Task Priorities is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

How to use 4-Quadrants Time Management using your own custom priorities

Jiri Novotny — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 09:53:05 +0000

Maybe you’ve heard about Stephen Covey’s four quadrants time management system, first published in his book First Things First (1994). The system allows you to divide your tasks into 4 categories that enable you to identify the really important tasks.

I’ve always liked this system, but not everyone knows it or wants to use it. That’s why we have decided to make the priorities fully customizable in Swift To-Do List 7 – now you can use Swift To-Do List with any time management / prioritizing system you want. You can easily turn it into 4-quadrants task management software and this post will show you how.

Create your own custom priorities in Swift To-Do List 7

Using the 4-quadrants system with Swift To-Do List 7 is very easy. Click the Manage menu and then Priorities…. Here you can customize all your priorities. Simply rename the default priorities to:

Urgent and important
Urgent and not important
Not urgent and important
Not urgent and not important

(You can delete the rest of priorities). Now, all you have to do is to set the correct priorities to your tasks and always try to do as much of the important tasks as possible.

Tip – you can also use some coding for the priorities to make them shorter, like I-U (as = Important & Urgent), I-NU (Important & Not Urgent), NI-U, NI-NU, etc. Use your imagination.

Using Stephen Covey's 4-Quadrants Time Management technique with Swift To-Do List 7, the number one task management software for Windows

When you fully develop this habit, you will become much more efficient. Stephen Covery further expands on this in his another book Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People.

But hey, you can even invent your own prioritizing system. We are all unqiue, so perhaps you already have an idea what might help you to be more productive.

You can choose your own colors for your priorities – or you don’t have to use colors at all. Creating custom priorities can be fun, and Swift To-Do List 7 gives you the power to do just that.

This is how the Add Task dialog will look like after you edit the priorities:

Add Task dialog with 4-Quadrants priorities

How to use 4-Quadrants Time Management using your own custom priorities is a post from: Swift To-Do List Blog

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