iPrioritize

Whether you are a student surviving in college, a editor of a newspaper, manager of a factory, or even a CEO of Apple, prioritizing your work is one of the most important step to take in order to succeed in your field. If you always get your work done in time and have time left to go over them to make it perfect, then there's a good chance that you are using the strategy that involves prioritizing your works. Prioritizing your works not only helps your schedule to be more efficient, but it helps you stay focused on the task you are given. However, if you are stuck in a cycle where you feel like you have a infinite load of works and can't never focus on one thing without worrying about other assignments, there's a good chance that you are not prioritizing your works. Rather you are just finishing assignments one by one hopelessly without efficiency and hoping that eventually you will be freed. If you ever thought to yourself "How in the world am I ever going to finish all these today?", this strategy is for you. This week, I will discuss about the strategy that will help you prioritize your work and make your life less stressed out. Let's take a look.

Before we begin, I recommend you to read my previous post about the planner that I use, because this strategy involves the use of the planner. You can find the posting here. Because I modified the original ranking priority strategy to work with my current workflow, it might not work with your planner or strategy and should only be used as a reference to help you create your own strategy.

First of all, you should have a planner with all of your assignments, projects, and exams with their respective due dates written down. Prioritizing your work require you to examine the due dates, how long it will take you to finish, how important the assignments are for your grade, and requirements to finish the assignments.

*CLS 105 assignments written down, ready to be prioritized*

Once you have your assignments written down, it's time to prioritize them.

Few things to consider when prioritizing your work:

- take a quick look at your assignments

- think about what needs to be done today and what can wait

- don't underestimate the time it takes for you to do your part in a group projects and always finish them early to have time left to go over them

ex) group projects that require your parts to be done in order to move on to the next

- if you know you are never going to tackle certain assignments and find yourself pushing dates back constantly, get rid of it

- don't be afraid of re-prioritize. Things change, so should your planner

- keep your planner simple and focused; only put things that are absolutely important to you

- KISS; Keep It Simple and Straightforward. Make sure your planner doesn't end up as your to do list for everything

*ranking a priority to assignments*

Now it's time to assign priorities to the assignments. There are few options for adding priority to individual assignment. You can add priority when you are initially adding assignments. You can also re-prioritize them later by double tapping the check circle next to the assignment title. As you can see in above image, the ballon menu with option to assign low, normal, high levels of priority appears. Simply choose the priority level for the selected assignment. When you are finished, tap once to check them off from your list.

It's that simple.

*assignments that are given priorities*

(you can see that each assignments have different priorities)

*you can also view assignments in different categories*

(let's you view assignments in due date, courses, and priority)

There are many ways to customize this strategy to fit your current workflow. That's what I did. Whether you are using classic planner, or digital planner on your phone, everyone can take advantage of this great strategy. For example, using the planner on my phone, I can chunk the big projects into smaller tasks that can be done over time and also keeping track of my progress along the way. For the smaller tasks, I can assign them for less priority level and high priority level for the final project which requires greater attention. I applied this strategy for the faculty interview and it blew me away in terms of efficiency and consolidating tasks. Because of my unique way of adapting to these strategies, I have combined three strategies in one unique strategy that works perfect for me: ranking priority, chunking the task, and target planner in one simple planner that's always in my pocket.

*Applying 'chunking the task' strategy into my planner was suggested to me by

Dr. Blumin and helped me to find that last missing piece to make my planner perfect.

Thank you Dr. Blumin for great suggestion!*