How do I choose what to work on first?

My mentee had been working all weekend long on getting a couple of critical deliverables done and, unfortunately, she did not finish them in the timeframe that she had wanted to.

We went through an exercise where I asked her to list out all the items that she had been working on during the weekend. I will be using generic project names for simplicity sake.

• Catching up on mail
• Project X with 200 person impact
• Project Y with 50 person impact
• Project Z with 20 person impact

I then asked her for the due dates for each of these.

• Catching up on mail - on-going/never ending
• Project X with 200 person impact - Monday of end of day
• Project Y with 50 person impact - Monday end of day
• Project Z with 20 person impact - Monday beginning of day

I then asked her to prioritize these efforts.

• Project Z with 20 person impact - Monday beginning of day
• Project X with 200 person impact - Monday of end of day
• Project Y with 50 person impact - Monday end of day
• Catching up on mail - on-going/never ending

The final question was in what order did you actually work on them. This was where she realized her error and said, "I can't even prioritize correctly." I corrected her and ensured she understood that she was more than capable of prioritizing, but she just needed to listen to the clear priorities she was more than capable at setting. The below chart describes that prioritization she provided:

	Due Soon	Due Later
Important	1	2
Less important	3	4

We, as humans, can only focus on one item at a time and we mistake the ability to work on multiple items concurrently as multi-tasking. However, this is context switching and there is a cost to this effort.

One point that needs to be driven home is that differentiation of priorities is critical to effectiveness. If the message you are giving yourself is that all projects are priority 1, you are telling yourself that none of them are priority 1.

While this post has not talked about a few items (effort required, setting proper expectations), the above chart will ensure effectiveness as opposed to efficiency. Efficiency is the getting things done quickly. Effectiveness is getting the right things done.