How To Prioritize Tasks Like A Pro: Ultimate Guide

Feeling overwhelmed by your task list? Join the line.

Whether it’s five, fifteen, or 500, to-do or task lists can be one of the most soul-destroying, demotivating, moving parts of any professional’s job. What makes it worse is that the list keeps growing. And growing constantly. Usually, at a faster rate than the rate of your task completion. So this ups the pressure. Puts extra stress on your already highly stressful situation with competing priorities which pushes you to look for a solution.

We've been in the task and project management industry for over 15 years, so we know the pain. And we also know the solution.

Task prioritization is a process that is not supposed to be taken lightly, so without further ado, here's a step-by-step guide on how to prioritize tasks like a true pro.

Step 1: List All Your Tasks

Before you can prioritize tasks, you need to get them out of your head and put them on a list.

Now I know what you’re thinking: ‘How is this prioritizing’?

It isn’t.

It’s setting up the foundation for ‘prioritization’ to work.

Doing an initial, general list of tasks helps you achieve a couple of things:

1. Clarity – Gives you a clear overview of how many tasks you have waiting to be completed.
2. Calm – By taking the load off your mind (transferring tasks to a physical source), you can squash the feeling of overwhelm.
3. Categorization – When you have a general list to work with, it’ll be easier to spot, categorize, and prioritize tasks using one of the prioritization techniques we talk about in this blog.

While you can do this in a spreadsheet or table, using a task management tool like ActiveCollab will make it much easier to track, edit, and manage. Some of the things you can do in these tools, like schedule due dates, set multiple labels to each task and assign tasks to other team members, would be impossible to do in a traditional spreadsheet or table. These tools also make it easier to filter, find, and sort all your tasks when the time comes to apply one of the eight prioritization techniques to your list of to-dos.

Step 2: Identify Impact & Value

Next, it’s time to ask yourself: ‘Which tasks bring the most value or deliver the greatest impact? Because not all tasks will be high value or critical.

The majority will probably be small, admin or time-consuming tasks that need to be done, but which don’t drive any significant, strategic impact for your business.

This step helps you filter out and divide tasks into two broad categories: important and not important.

To do that, ask yourself the following questions for each task:

For every task you answered ‘yes’ to, you should tag it as an important task.

If you are using a task management tool to compile your list, like ActiveCollab, you can simply create and apply important and not important task labels to each item. If not, you can highlight or apply a filter system for these two categories.

Step 3: Establish Time & Resources

The third step is to allocate the time and resources you have at your disposal for critical tasks or larger tasks.

Next to each task, mark the estimated time and personnel you have to work with. For example, you might be a content marketing lead who has two large projects underway:

1. Blog updates: Manage the delivery of 500 blog post updates in five months so they generate more organic traffic and conversions. You have hired five writers to take on this work.
2. Customer Success: Create a content strategy and plan for customer success stories that needs to be launched in two months. You’ll take ownership of creating the strategy and plan, and a junior marketing assistant will provide support. You might be able to move one of the writers from the blog project to this one to help with writing the success stories once the time comes.

While the first project may seem larger because the content lead has five writers (resources) taking care of the updates, the most the content lead will need to do is assign, monitor, track, and review the pieces. So they’ll need to allocate two days a week (time) over the five months of their time to this piece.

For the second piece, it will require three days a week with the support of the junior and possible transfer of one writer (resources) to this project.

Step 4: Determine Dependant & Bottleneck Tasks

Some tasks will depend on others to be completed before they can be actioned. These tasks can cause a bottleneck in your entire workflow and bring projects to a halt. This step is to identify those task dependencies so you can prioritize and remove the blockage they cause for your entire team’s workflow.

A good example of this would be a marketing agency scenario. As the agency founder and Marketing Director, you probably have several teams waiting on you to review, sign off or develop the talking points for a new client brief. These are all bottleneck tasks. So you’ll want to do one thing:

• Determine which tasks are blocking the most valuable or urgent projects. Prioritize them.

Mark and link your dependent and bottleneck tasks on your general task list so you know which tasks have a prerequisite subtask which needs to be completed beforehand. Most advanced task management tools like ActiveCollab let you create task dependencies that connect the tasks in a parent-child relationship so they always show up in the right order.

Step 5: Choose & Apply A Prioritization Technique

Once you’ve captured the key information for each task, you can choose a prioritization technique or method.

In this section we share eight different methods, listed in order of simplest to most complex. The first few are best suited for simple task lists, while the latter ones are a better fit for more difficult ones which have several moving parts.

#1 Eat The Frog

Eat the Frog is a simple technique used for prioritizing tasks, but it’s also a productivity and procrastination hack.

It works on the principle that you choose the most difficult or complex task as your first task each day. Once that’s out of the way, you can focus on the smaller less important tasks which you can prioritize based on deadlines or impact.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – The best thing about this method is its simplicity. Usually, most of us can spot our most important task a mile away. It’s the one that serves the highest purpose and involves the most work.
• Pro – It gets you to face discomfort and overcome it first thing in the morning. So it builds resilience and for procrastinators, it helps you start and do.
• Con – While it may work wonders for small lists and identifying the ‘one’ ultimate task, it doesn’t help with prioritizing the other items on your to-do list.
• Con – If you’re not a morning person, this technique can be difficult and might not result in your most productive work.

#2 Most Important Task (MIT) Method

Another fairly simple but a little more comprehensive approach is the Most Important Task method.

The idea is to pick one to three most important tasks you must complete that day. These tasks need to be related to your purpose or strategic goal.

Pros & Cons

• Pro – By selecting a small number, you increase focus on these strategic tasks and remove the pressure that comes with working on or thinking about a dozen deliverables.
• Pro – Having an end-of-day deadline encourages you to organize your time each day so tasks don’t stretch for days at a time.
• Con – Not suitable for large tasks that need several days or weeks to complete like project deliverables in product development.
• Con – The unbalanced focus on priority tasks only, may leave other less business-driven tasks to be neglected.

#3 The Pickle Jar Theory

If you like to get a visual representation of tasks, The Pickle Jar theory might be worth trying out. It’s also known as Bucket of Rocks or Jar of Life theory. What it does is get you to imagine your tasks as items that need to fit into a jar. The idea is to place and prioritize the largest items first (core tasks) and then follow with smaller items based on the value they produce.

Assign each of your tasks a label based on the value it carries:

1. Rocks – Are your chunky, high value, strategic tasks that probably require the most time and effort to complete. Choose no more than three tasks to be your ‘rocks’.
2. Pebbles – Are your next most valuable tasks which don’t demand a huge amount of time and resources. There’s no limit to the number of ‘pebbles’ but you need to keep in mind what’s realistically achievable.
3. Sand – Are you small tasks that might not be hugely important but still bring benefits or need to be done.

Once you’ve given your tasks the appropriate label, start working on your rocks first and then move onto the pebbles, before you finally get to the sand tasks.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – Because it helps you picture your tasks as rocks, pebbles, and sand, it can be one of the best ways to visualize priorities, not just list them. It also keeps you focused on doing the hard tasks instead of cruising through the easy ones.
• Con – Some of your rock tasks might be more like boulders. If that’s the case, you might get discouraged by the method if you spend more time than you imagined on the one strategic task. One way you can avoid this is to break down large priority tasks into subtasks and then divide, and label them.

#4 ABCDE Method

On the other hand if you want a process that will help you organize your tasks into categories based on importance, and offload the ones that are not vital, you could try the ABCDE method.

Simply divide tasks into one of the five ABCDE buckets:

1. A – Very important: High value and high business impact tasks.
2. B – Less important: Valuable tasks that are important, but not urgent.
3. C – Enjoyable: Tasks you like and find pleasure in doing.
4. D – Delegate: Tasks you can delegate out to other team members.
5. E – Eliminate: Low or no value tasks that are not essential.

You start with the ‘A’ tasks first, then move onto ‘B’ tasks and finally ‘C’. The last two are taken off your ‘list’. You could even delegate the ‘D’ tasks as soon as you identify them and delete the ‘E’ tasks so they are no longer taking up space on your list.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – You can offload a good portion of your unimportant tasks at the very beginning which gives because you will delegate them to other members of your team or scrap them altogether.
• Pro – It’s a simple method that works well for small and large teams and projects of all sizes.
• Con – If you have a large number of priority tasks (your ‘A’ and ‘B’ tasks), the method doesn’t offer a process to prioritize them effectively.
• Con – The ‘C’ category risks being delayed because it doesn’t feel like a priority.

#5 1-3-5 Rule

For those of you who like to put a cap on their task list, the 1-3-5 (or sometimes 1-3-9) Rule might be the method you choose. This one also directs your focus on the vital tasks first and then moves onto the less essential ones.

The idea is to limit yourself to nine (or 13 if you are working to the 1-3-9 Rule) tasks in total:

• 1 vital task – This is a core, major priority business task that must be completed.
• 3 important tasks – These are your high priority, but maybe not vital pieces of work.
• 5-9 good-to-have tasks – These are valuable tasks which are not imperative.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – Limits the number of items you need to action, which can take the pressure off.
• Pro – Pushes you to focus on one critical task at a time rather than juggling multiple tasks which can increase errors and decrease productivity.
• Con – Because the method restricts the number of tasks you can have in the first two categories it won’t help if you're working with many priority tasks.
• Con – If your number one task is a complex (which could have been split into several tasks) you might never get to the other tasks.

#6 Impact Effort Matrix

If you want a more targeted prioritization technique that lets you order tasks based on their impact and available resources, you could turn to the Impact Effort Matrix or Action Priority Matrix.

The way it works is by dividing tasks into for quadrants:

1. High impact, low effort – Most beneficial tasks that require the least amount of time and resources. These are your ‘quick wins’.
2. High impact, high effort – More complex items that come with high value. These are referred to as ‘major projects’ in the matrix.
3. Low impact, low effort – Smaller tasks that might not seem particularly useful but they could be a building block that simplifies one of the major tasks.
4. Low impact, high effort – Irrelevant tasks that take a lot of time and effort but bring little or almost no value. These are referred to as ‘time-wasters’. In the ABCDE method, these would be your ‘E’ tasks.

Pros & Cons:

Pro – It’s an ideal method for team tasks management and project deliverables prioritization because it lets the entire team map out action items and see the value system for task allocation.

Con – You need to have a fairly accurate estimate for time and resources for this system to work. Otherwise, you might categorize and prioritize tasks in the wrong order.

#7 Eisenhower Matrix

For those of you that are being overwhelmed and burdened by a mix of deadline-driven as well as large and small miscellaneous tasks, it might be worth-while giving the Eisenhower Matrix a go. It’s a combination of the ABCDE method and the Impact Effort Matrix, but it also factors in task urgency.

Start by creating four categories or quadrants with various combinations of urgency and importance:

• Group 1: Do – Urgent and important tasks that have deadlines or can negatively impact business.
• Group 2: Schedule – Tasks that might not have deadlines but are important core business drivers.
• Group 3: Delegate – Tasks that need to be completed but that don’t have to be actioned by you.
• Group 4: Delete – Distractions or tasks that are not important for business.

When you’ve divided all your tasks into the four groups, delegate the tasks in Group 3, and delete the tasks in Group 4. Then you are free to start working on tasks in Group 1 and follow on to Group 2.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – Gives you a clear visual guide on important tasks and deadline driven tasks and eliminates unnecessary tasks.
• Con – Like some of the other methods, you’ll still need to prioritize tasks within those first two groups and there is no method for it.

#8 MoSCoW Method

The last technique in our list is the MoSCoW method. It works best for tasks lists with an end goal or delivery timeframe, which makes it ideal for prioritizing and identifying high-impact tasks in projects and product development initiatives.

Here, again you divide tasks into four categories:

1. Must haves/dos – These are your non-negotiable tasks that must be done. Think ‘business-critical’ actions.
2. Should haves/dos – These are your highly desirable tasks that should be completed. Think ‘still important’.
3. Could haves/dos – These are your optional tasks that are worth doing. Think ‘nice-to-haves’.
4. Won’t haves/dos – These are the tasks you can delay or remove for now. Think ‘not necessary’.

The idea is to focus on the tasks in categories 1 and 2 first, then move on to category 3 and leave off the tasks in category 4.

Pros & Cons:

• Pro – It’s a simple system that helps you land your most valuable tasks first.
• Con – There is a risk of forgetting or continuously delaying the ‘Won’t haves/dos’ which might still need to be done at some point.

Step 6: Use a Task Management Tool to Schedule & Track Your Task Completion

Once you’ve come up with a snapshot of all your tasks and their order of priority, it’s time to schedule and see them through to completion.

Now, this is where digital tasks lists can’t be beaten: in the scheduling, planning, and tracking process. Because no written list or formatted spreadsheet will help you stay on top of all your to-dos the way a digital tool will. This is especially true for full-scale task management software platforms, which offer a kaleidoscope of tracking, labeling, and monitoring features that will support you every step of the way to the final delivery of every single task.

Conclusion: How ActiveCollab Helps You Manage & Prioritize Tasks

To prioritize your tasks effectively, you need to evaluate their impact and rationalize whether they are realistically achievable. Applying prioritization techniques to your task lists can help you clarify these two key points.

ActiveCollab is a powerful task management tool that simplifies task prioritization and gives you the functionality to plan, schedule, and track all your tasks in order of importance.

So if you are looking for a better way to manage multiple paper trails of tasks and to-do lists, where you can neatly organize, view, edit, label, and categorize them at the click of a button, ActiveCollab would be the tool you’re after.

It promises to take much of the pain away when it comes to keeping a bird’s-eye view of looming deadlines with reminders. And when you're a team member or two down, you can simply reassign the tasks to someone else on the team without needing to go through a debrief because all the task information is stored within each task.

ActiveCollab is ideal for Small and Midsize Enterprises (SME) and start ups looking to scale. Marketing, digital, and PR agencies, as well as event and consultancy businesses, love us because we streamline and simplify their entire workflow. But task prioritization and management is just one perk of our full-scale productivity and collaboration software.