Do the Highest Priority Tasks First

Because, they are the most important – but why haven't they been done yet, then?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Having been a project manager for most of my adult life, I have learned that this is a thing people always believe in: You must do first, what is on top of the priority list.

But there are sometimes very good reasons for those tasks to be on the list in the first place – reasons for them to not just having been done when they were encountered. Of course, they may be part of a project that hasn’t started, so nothing has been so yet. But if they are still there after a while, it is mostly because they cannot be done first.

It really is that simple!

You often have to go around the big rock that lies in front of you, because you cannot climb it. You want to move forward, and for whatever reason, getting on top of that rock is important, but it is also immensely difficult from where you are now.

Doing some of the other things can then sometimes, magically, make that top priority task easier. It could be that other tasks are preconditions for doing the top priority one, which is of course an easy-to-understand situation, but it can also be more subtle:

Some of the lesser tasks, those that are not highly prioritized, often tend to pave the way for doing the top one. For each of these you complete, the top task becomes easier. In the case with the rock ahead of you, some of the other tasks may include building a crane, which could then lift you up on top of that rock. Then the top priority task moves from being difficult to becoming very easy, but only because you chose to do another task first.

And that crane might not have been identified as a precondition for getting up on the rock – it may have been needed for some other reasons.

Another situation is when you start a project and all tasks are new, all look difficult.

You need to get started somewhere, and thereby learn something more about the world in which the project takes place, and the way everything functions in that world. For instance, who you can trust will take active part in solving the tasks, and how solid the project foundation is, when it comes to such as economy and the support from the top management in the company. Or from the public, if it’s a project that changes something in the cityscape.

So, you’ll start with some of the simple tasks, which will allow you to feel your way forward for a while, until you know more about what it will take to do some of the higher prioritized, but harder tasks.

A third scenario is when you develop something in your project, and there will be some assisting structures needed, which can either be part of the top priority task, which will then also take very long to complete because it contains a very large part of the project’s subtasks, or you can do some of these assisting structures – could be helping functions of various kinds in a computer program, or the transportation of materials and setting up the tools for a building project – as part of other, lower prioritized tasks, thereby seeing how the top task is getting smaller all the time, until it will be reduced to an easy thing to do.

The funny thing about this approach is, that you’ll often get faster through the complete list, because you won’t have as many blockings – things that cannot be solved easily, therefore taking a lot of time, but not on actually solving the task, more on trying to find a way to do it. Such time is, effectively, wasted time, and with my approach you reduce that.

Finally, I want to point at the psychological factor: getting through many of the items on the list in a short time makes you feel like things are going well. That equips you with a belief that a task, whenever you bump into such one, that isn’t as easy as the first ones, will also be solvable, so you just get into it without too much worrying, and that will often do the trick.

As a contrast, by attempting to do the toughest tasks first, you’ll spend a long time before anything seems to move forward in the project, and that can be tough on the motivation. When you then get to the next task, and it gives you a bit of resistance, you’ll immediately think that this is never going to be a success.

In other words: prioritize the good feelings and the preparation that lies in doing many of the small and easy tasks first, and you’ll see how your project process rate will go up!