Is urgency enough for planning?

Everything is urgent but urgent is subjective so make it objective!

Planning is very important to have things done on time but it is not always easy to do and to maintain. You might plan your day or week and start to work based on your plan but there is always unexpected tasks that will cause you to change your plan. Unfortunately almost all new tasks come as "urgent". What should be the methodology if everything is urgent? Should you plan them in order as they arrived, according to the level of person who ask you to do or based on something else? 

All people subjectively consider their own jobs as urgent and important. If you are working together with more than one person, it is more likely that you will have urgent tasks on your desk being followed by many people. In such a case you need to find a way to prioritize them with an objective urgency level. Otherwise, you will end up having some tasks that are not finished on time and some are ready before they are required.

My methodology is making use of "due date" and "time required". If these are not enough to include everything in my plan to finish on time, I consider my "responsibility level" as the third criterion.

Always be aware about due dates of your tasks. If it is not told you in advance, do not hesitate to ask! Then calculate time required based on your previous experiences. If you are not experienced on this task you might ask further questions about required length of document and detail level or spend a few minutes to search through knowledge databases of your firm, through the Internet or by asking people who worked on this subject  to understand what exactly should be done.

Start placing the tasks on a time line base on their due dates. You might develop different strategies for that but if you do not have any strategy that fits you best or does not have any idea, "Urgency/Importance Matrix" is a useful tool. 

List all tasks on your to-do-list and first give them an importance level. You can use different scales as low-medium-high or give numbers from 1 to 5. Then draw four quadrants as left. In addition to importance, consider urgency level of your tasks and place them in related quadrants. Then you are ready to fill your timeline. Start placing the tasks in 1st quadrant, continue with 2 and 4 and finally place tasks in 3rd quadrant. If you are not able to include all tasks based on their due dates and time required, you are almost done to eliminate tasks with low importance and low urgency. However, you should be careful not to eliminate all tasks in 3rd quadrant for a long period because most probably these will be activities that you want to do to enjoy, gain energy, refresh which are also very important for your overall performance. If the tasks that you could not fit your timeline are required by someone else, do not lose time to inform people about you do not have time to do this task. It is obviously better to be honest than not to keep promises. This will also make people let you know about tasks earlier.

All these might seem so structural and time consuming but when you get used to, it will start to be automatically in your brain and will help you to use your time efficiently. I am absolutely sure that if you do not have any plan, you spend time on thinking what to do next! And if your immediate decision does not work well, you switch tasks and spend additional time to focus on each. When you are becoming expert on planning, you will develop your own strategies, tools, balancers etc.

As an example, I usually do not plan short tasks. 

If someone asks me for a small thing that will take less than 10 minutes, although it is not urgent, I do it immediately. Because I know that if I do not do it now, I will delay it till due date and maybe I will not have even 10 minutes at that time. It will also keep place in my mind and create additional stress. Moreover, when I do it directly after the person asks, s/he will be happy and have more tolerance towards me in future. 

Another thing that I do different than the tool suggests, I do not always do importance tasks first. If they fit in my timeline, I try to finish as more tasks as possible before starting the most important one. Of course leaving some more time than required for unexpected problems. By doing that, I do not let other tasks to disturb me while working on the important one and can focus better. Another thing is people work more efficiently when close to due. This method also helps me to ensure quality in less important tasks. When  I start from the most important, I always want to spend more time to make it perfect which cause less time to others. However, by this way, the waiting important task make me work efficient on the others and close due date make me work efficiently on the important one. 

Learn about planning tools that will help you to develop your own methods that will fit you most.