As a programmer, I’m constantly juggling a million tasks. Well, not exactly a million, but it really feels like that sometimes. And even while I’m juggling all of the tasks that I have to do, things are often changing during the day when new tasks are created and have to be added.
That means that prioritization is really important for me. But the problem is that I frequently have multiple tasks in the same priority category that need to be dealt with. For instance, there are times when I might have as many as nine or 10 High priority tasks to work on. Often, it seems like everything is the most important thing to do – so I end up with a whole lot of Very Important Things To Do and I don’t know which one to start with! It gets pretty confusing. And when I don’t have anyone to ask for help, sometimes I have to make an educated guess at which one to start with.
That doesn’t always work out so well. The other day, I made the wrong choice and my team leader was angry that I didn’t finish the right tasks. I was upset the whole day. I felt guilty for wasting everyone’s time, but I really was trying to do the right thing. It completely stresses me out and makes me even more nervous each time I have to pick a new task to work on. A lot of the time I just end up multitasking, going back and forth between different items since they all seem important. Unfortunately, the reality is that multitasking is very unproductive and it ends up taking much longer for me to get anything accomplished at all that way.
Fortunately Elementool has become a huge help for me and my team members when we’re dealing with this situation. It has a feature called ‘Priority List’ that makes it simple to sort same-priority level tasks in the ideal order for them to be completed. The Priority List makes it possible to define that order by just assigning a priority level value to each issue. So Priority Value 1 means that the issue should be finished first, Priority Value 2 means that it should be completed second … you get the idea. Each issue has its own unique priority level value, which is set by our team leader, so it’s impossible to have two issues with the same priority level. And that takes the burden off MY shoulders because I don’t have to guess anymore what I should work on.
Now all I have to do is look at the Priority List to see exactly what I need to be working on at any moment of the day.
There’s no more confusion now because I don’t have to do all that guesswork. And my stress has gone WAY down since I know that I’m always doing things according to plan. Overall, it just makes my life much, much easier. Instead of juggling multiple tasks or worrying that I’m not even working on the right task, I can simply focus on the details of the task at hand and concentrate on doing my job well. Even my boyfriend told me that I seem a lot more relaxed when I come back home from work. Now I finally feel like I’m doing the right thing every minute of the day.
Thank you Elementool!