How to Organize Tasks and Increase Efficiency

By on July 22, 2014 | Topics: Employee Training, Task Management

A lot of times tasks don’t get completed because employees aren’t aware of the importance of a given task. Or, some tasks may be more difficult than others and employees put them off. You spend a lot of money paying your workers, so you want employee productivity to be high and that can mean assuring certain tasks get done before others.

This issue can be easily fixed, but if it is ignored, you will continue to pay for mediocre results. One solution is to set organize tasks by setting priority levels on all of your tasks. By simply letting your employees know which tasks are crucial, they will feel more obligated to do them. I don’t mean micromanage your staff, but steer them in the right direction.

If you’re using pen and paper checklists prioritizing tasks can be more difficult because you tend to write tasks down as you think of them. Here are some tips to better organize and prioritize your tasks.

Highlighter Method

If you don’t have too many tasks, a simple color coordination using highlighters may work for you. After writing down the tasks, highlight them with the corresponding colors. Blue could mean first priority, pink could mean second, and so on. Don’t forget to include a key so your employees can easily identify which tasks are important. This method can get messy, however, and you may have some color blind employees that would struggle with it.

Brainstorm Then Organize

Another way to easily prioritize tasks and increase efficiency is to brainstorm all the tasks you want completed into a master list. From there, create a numbered list starting with 1 being the most important task. The problem with this is you cannot easily add tasks as they come up. For example, if you have a list of twenty tasks and you think of one more after you have created the checklist, you cannot easily make it priority number 3 without either recreating the entire list or drawing arrows all over the paper.

Use Our Free Template

Since we know that both of the above methods are really like bandages when you could use some stitches, we have created a free template download that will help you better prioritize your tasks and checklists. Although none of these methods compare to a software solution, our template will get you one step closer to achieving better business goals.

Click here for photo credit.

The Control Manager's Guide to Highly Effective
Log & Task Management
Log & Task Management