Prioritizing...really

Everyone says prioritize..."We've got to keep our priorities straight.", "What's our number one objective as a company?", "You're not juggling your responsibilities effectively.". What specifically do they mean?

I find that managers, including myself, struggle to define what we mean by what is really a pretty cliche biz term. We may have an innate ability to part through a sea of responsibilities to determine what is most important, and even more likely, we may find it easy to define priorities because we determine what's a priority for those around us. But how do we actually train someone else to prioritize competing responsibilities?

I want to communicate this effectively to someone else in a better manner than just - that's not a priority, but this is. Studying this further, I came up with a few questions that helped me put structure around the prioritizing cloud:

1. What has an actual delegated deadline?
   Meaning, did someone else determine a task had a specific deadline (date/time) vs did I just tell myself a task had to be done by a specific date or time? The actual deadline should always trump the internal deadline.
   
   
2. What is the most essential for our company?
   Meaning, what is actually turning good profits? Whatever project or task is producing revenue or has the potential to produce revenue for our company should be the next highest priority.
   
   
3. What is Relationship-building?
   Meaning, what is providing a service to our clients that is building our good name in their eyes vs completing internal projects or work?
   

This is less than an exact science, so these do have to be re-shuffled. You obviously don't want to only put deadline projects and profit-generators in the front seat every time, or you'll become a selfish, hard-edged company no one wants to work with (nor should they). But in an effort to begin the conversation of what is meant by prioritizing, I found this a helpful matrix.

Use this as a beginning point as you're working with those around you to determine how to prioritize your own work internally. This is definitely an evolving art - so realize that these are questions you'll have to tackle every day and probably redefine multiple times.

If you're not having these conversations, you're probably not prioritizing as a team. So take a stab at it and see what happens...