In a time when markets are down and belts start to tighten, every business begins to make cuts and prioritize. Only the projects that provide the most benefit, or are a top business priority, remain. The process a business uses to prioritize projects and make decisions on cuts can either be focused and productive or disorganized and stifling.

I have seen both of these approaches and the effects they can have on employees and organizations as whole. In the same manner that looking at the big picture can help us work better, I think we can learn from watching what happens in our businesses and apply it to our own prioritization, planning and Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.

Here are five lessons I have learned about personal prioritization from the business prioritization process:

1. Plan, Debate, Execute - Don’t Plan, Debate, Plan, Debate, Debate, Half Execute - When you are planning your day, week, or month, don’t over-plan and over-think, you will end up with very focused plans and no time to execute them in. Some businesses debate which small projects to execute so long that they could have just executed them.

2. Consult Your Advisers and Mentors - But Not Too Many - The old adage “too many cooks spoil the meal” holds true in personal and business task/project prioritization.  Yes, you should have a mentor, a financial adviser, career helper, good friends, connections and the like but just like a project prioritization team that includes 30 executives, a person that looks for too much feedback will ultimately waste time and fail to prioritize in a timely manner.

3.  Use Quantifiable Metrics - Business don’t rely just on “feel”, neither should you.  Put together time, cost and benefit estimates for your tasks and projects and weigh them heavily in you decision making to speed up the process.

4. Dedicate Time to Prioritizing - Don’t Multi-Task - Having 30 executives in a room (as mentioned in #3) creates a lot of churn but, if they are all multi-tasking at the same time the prioritization effort becomes chaos.  Just as a business’s project selection team should be focused while they complete their planning, so should an individual.  Trying to prioritize while you are doing tasks just drags things out and makes you more likely to make the tasks that are in progress more important due to “sunk costs”.

5. Don’t Get Too Emotional - When emotions flare up during business decision making, logic goes out the window.  Try to be as realistic and level headed as possible when setting the order of your todos, when emotions take hold your list, and day can get out of whack.  If you do let emotions take hold, take a break and come back later just like a project team does when meetings get heated.

How do you prioritize?  Have you observed anything enlightening during your businesses project selection processes?  Share them in the comments!

photo by assbach