You have sweated over your plan – lots of new issues have arisen and you find yourself staring at a seemingly overwhelming list of tasks. You have to prioritise, but how do you begin, when everything seems so important? Here is a little matrix you may find useful. If you have been working with cards to create your strategy, you can draw the matrix out on a sheet of paper then drop the task cards into the respective boxes.

Priority Matrix to help prioritise your tasks

You will see that the vertical arrow indicates how important the tasks are, and the horizontal one which tasks really need your own personal attention – those at the far right nobody else can do. So the tasks you drop into box ‘A’ are the most important tasks, and also the ones only you can do – these need addressing straight away! Those tasks you put into box ‘C’ are equally important, but somebody else can do them equally well – delegate these straight away!

The tasks in box ‘B’ can only be done by you, but they are less urgent so you can deal with them after you have done those in box ‘A’.

Those in box ‘D’ can be handled by others once all the other items have been done – often it’s worth looking at these closely to see if there any that don’t need doing at all.