Here’s an email I received from one of our clients:
Hi Allison,
I wonder if you can help me.
I watched all your clips about project management and understand the importance of prioritizing tasks.
At my company, we prioritize everything. We have 3 priority levels:
High – tasks that should be completed ASAP.
Medium – Tasks that should be completed but are not urgent.
Low – tasks that can wait until we completed the High and Medium tasks.
This works fine for us. But here’s when things become confusing.
Let’s say for example that I have 9 high priority tasks.
I remember that you said in the past that multitasking is a bad idea, and we should avoid it at any cost. So if I can only work on one task at a time, how do I know which task to pick out of the 9 high priority tasks?
Best regards,
Allan.
Allan,
That’s a very good question and I’m happy that you brought it up.
It is very common that when you prioritize tasks correctly, you might have several tasks with the same priority level and it’s hard to decide which one to work on first.
This is why we developed a new feature that will enable you to sort tasks with the same priority level by the order in which they should be completed.
We call this feature ‘Priority List’. It will be released in a few weeks.
The Priority List feature enables you to define the order in which tasks should be completed, by assigning a priority level value to each issue.
For example: Priority Value 1 means that the issue should be completed first.
Priority Value 2 means that the task should be completed second, after the issue with Priority Value 1 has been completed, and so on.
Each issue has a unique priority level value. This means that it is impossible to have two issues with the same priority level.
This solves your problem of not knowing which task to complete first.
The Priority Level value is defined by the team leader. This is a user that has permission to setup Priority Levels.
The team leader opens an issue and sets the Priority Level of this issue on the top right corner of the form.
When team members login to the account, they can see the list of issues assigned to them sorted by their priority levels on their Welcome page.
The issue with the highest priority will be displayed first.
This way, team members know exactly which issue they should work on.
An issue is removed from the Priority List when the team member who’s assigned to this issue marks it as completed.
If you don’t already have an Issue Tracking account, I suggest that you sign up right now to a free 30 days trial by clicking on the Sign Up Now button below.