Prioritization of personal goals and affairs

It’s designed for the acquisition of skills to prioritize personal goals and affairs. It helps answer the question: What are the goals and affairs helping you to become successful?

In order to become successful and self-realize, person needs to set many goals in different spheres of life (work, family, hobbies, rest, etc.), and it’s necessary to perform a lot of affairs to achieve them.

Problems arise as to determine:
- what goals will help to become successful
- what affairs will help to achieve the goals and must be performed as soon as possible
- what affairs are useless or harmful and should be deferred or not performed at all

The solution to these problems is the prioritization of personal goals and affairs (establishment of priorities).

Priority is a comparative analysis of elements in some set relative to each other on a certain criteria for determining which elements of a set are of more significance relative to the selected criteria.

Criterion is a sign that any objects are compared, evaluated and classified with.

Sets may be many goals, affairs, projects, tasks, activities, etc. The criteria may be the importance, urgency, profitability, riskiness, etc.

There are many methods of prioritization: an ordered list, Eisenhower matrix, the matrix of priority actions (game model of decision-making theory), expert judgment, etc.

The most universal and precise methods are as follows:

To use these methods one must first make a complete list of personal goals and affairs (to materialize).

The method of weight ranking by one criterion

It is based on pairwise comparison of elements of the set with each other for their ranking by the defined criterion.

Ranking of the elements by defined criterion

The comparison is as follows - if the element 1 is more significant by the selected criterion than the element 2, the cell 1:2 1 point is set, and if less significant, then 0 points. If the elements are approximately equal in significant, then both can be set to 0 or 1 point. This comparison is performed for each pair of elements.

After comparing the points are summed across and the rank of each element is determined. The element with the highest rank has the highest priority.

Multicriterion ranking of the weight model

In this method, a list of criteria is made by which the elements will be prioritized.

Ranking of the elements by several criteria

For each criterion, the weigh ranking of the elements is performed. Then the sum of ranks by all criteria is calculated and on the base of total rank priorities of elements are established.

Prioritization of goals

To make the way to success more effective one needs to materialize all one’s goals. Make the list of personal goals and prioritize them using the methods described above. Determine which goals can be achieved only after the achievement of other goals (hierarchy of goals). For each goal one need to make a decision:

Review the final list of goals and priorities. Perhaps it will be big enough, but as a person has limited time, then one will not be able to achieve all the goals and will have to refuse some of them. Cross out goals that are of the least significance to you or that will bring the least useful results, and forget about them.

Prioritization of affairs

For the goals which one have decided to be achieved, one need to make the single list of affairs. These affairs also need to be prioritized and decided for each:

For each affair, ask yourself the question - what happens if I do not do it? If nothing bad or the affair will not bring close to the goal you should refuse it (delete from the list and forget).

Try to delegate affairs as much as possible - to entrust their performing to other people, for example, subordinate staff, employees or services. Delegate even when there is time and opportunity to perform it yourself. This will free your personal time to perform affairs of more priority, planning, management, or the generation of new ideas.

Every day perform affairs of the highest priority, don’t be distracted by ones of lesser priority. It is very important because people like to start with some at first glance easy and interesting, but little useful affair, so to say, to warm up. But then it turns out that it and other similar affairs spent the whole day. So make sure to start work each day with most priority affairs and don’t be distracted by little things.

If you cannot force myself to do the most important affairs and want to do something easier first but less useful, then use the method Training self-discipline.

If you have difficulties with the performance of the affair use the methods Problems solving and Generation of useful ideas.

With a lack of personal time use the method Managing personal time and service Personal time to find and eliminate the "absorbers" of time.

It is possible that some affairs will have the deadline for performing, even low-priority. Such affairs should be moved to a separate list, periodically review it and try to perform them as the period is approaching. But one can not to carry out such affairs the day before the deadline because there may be unforeseen problems, the solution of which can take a lot of time and one will be made to perform these things less qualitatively. So start to implement them in advance and if you are sure that you will cope rapidly with them, then set them aside for later, closer to the deadline.

As well as in achieving the goals, do not try to perform all affairs, you may just not have enough time. Delegating helps to solve this problem partially, but requires other resources but the time (money, equipment, etc.), which are also limited. Engage in only the most important affairs and do not be afraid to give up useless affairs.

Prioritization nuances

When new goals and affairs appear, immediately add them to the lists (materialize) and reprioritize, otherwise they can just be forgot.

The priority is relative and changeable because it’s affected by the external environment and personal experience. Periodically reprioritization should be performed to take into account new information and opportunities that appear constantly.

Consider the Pareto Law - 20% of efforts give 80% of the result. This means that by selecting the minimum of the most priority goals and affairs, you can quickly get a large part of the planned result but further improvements are ineffective and can be unjustified.

Prioritize personal goals and affairs by using the service Personal goals - Organizer and to-do list online

Like it? Tell your friends

Useful

And give your opinion about it

Do you think that this project useful?

Tell your friends about us Useful

Join us Name*: E-mail*: Example*: JOIN US If you are already join LOGIN Hide ads Ads

Hide ads