As a software developer, it can sometimes feel like your to-do list is an ever-growing mountain of tasks you’re struggling to climb.
When this happens, where do you start? And more importantly, how do you avoid procrastination, coming up short, and failing to meet deadlines?
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to use task prioritization to manage the madness, avoid procrastination, and four essential factors to consider when prioritizing what’s on your plate.
Procrastination vs. Task Prioritization
There’s a fine line between prioritizing specific tasks over others and procrastinating. Prioritizing is intentional, while procrastination is not.
In its simplest form, procrastination is delaying or postponing a task. While the term itself isn’t inherently negative, its lack of method often leads to missed deadlines and shortcomings.
Task prioritization involves a thoughtful analysis of the tasks at hand. Strategic decision-making enables you to identify tasks requiring immediate attention and those that can wait for a later time.
In short, it’s about approaching your to-do list with purpose and strategy.
Considerations When Prioritizing Tasks
When deciding which tasks need your immediate attention and what you can delay, there are four critical things to consider.
1. Dependencies
Considering dependencies is a great starting point when deciding what tasks you prioritize over others.
To prevent yourself from becoming a project bottleneck or causing delays for your peers, focus on prioritizing ‘blocking’ tasks. These are tasks that others rely on you to finish before they can proceed.
When deciding to postpone tasks, it’s crucial to assess the time needed for completion and make sure they’re not critical dependencies for other tasks with approaching deadlines.
2. Experience Gaps
Ever been told, “It’s a simple task; it should only take a few minutes.” Only to wrap up much later, realizing you were missing a crucial piece of information that turned your ‘simple task’ into a couple of hours of work.
In this case, it’s not necessarily a time management issue; it’s an experience gap. Chances are, it was assumed you had the experience and that crucial piece of information that would’ve allowed you to complete the task quickly.
Assumptions are tricky. Just because someone thinks it’s a quick job doesn’t always mean you’re equipped to breeze through it. Blindly accepting others’ estimated timelines is a dangerous game to play.
When deciding what demands your immediate attention, give a nod to experience. Consider moving the task up the priority ladder if there’s a potential gap. It might require more time than initially assumed.
3. Experience vs. Ability
Speaking of experience, understand that experience does not necessarily equate to ability. There can sometimes be confusion between the two.
Experience boils down to knowing how to execute a task based on past exposure, while ability is your capability to get the job done with the tools on hand under the current circumstances.
Once you’ve gathered the experience, you must evaluate your ability. Numerous factors come into play here – time constraints, your environment, and existing commitments, to name a few.
When assessing your ability to tackle a specific task, consider whether you can replicate your past completion time, accounting for your current commitments and external factors like meetings, holidays, and office environment.
4. Deadlines
Finally, let’s talk about hard deadlines. While this seems like a given, when you loop in external commitments and dependencies, managing time becomes more complex.
The deadline isn’t just about the task at hand; it extends to other tasks hinging on it, especially when collaborating in a team or project.
If your task plays a crucial role in someone else’s workflow, it should take precedence. Ensuring the success of the overall team or project requires placing importance on tasks with interdependence.
Final Thoughts
Managing deadlines and a multitude of tasks is often nuanced. There will always be additional factors to consider when prioritizing which tasks to approach first.
While the impossibility of doing everything at once might feel like you have no choice but to procrastinate, task prioritization offers a more systematic approach to managing your work without feeling overwhelmed.
By considering dependencies, experience gaps, ability, and deadlines, you’re accounting for multiple factors that can impact the time needed to complete a specific task, mitigating your risk of missing deadlines or coming up short.
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Ruben Vazquez-Chapa
