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Do You Know The Rules of Setting Priorities?

Posted 13 years ago

Managing the Intangible – Time: The Rules of Setting Priorities

Stop and think about it; few things are as valuable as “time”.  One can achieve great success, fortune, friendship, and love but time rules all of these. We control our achievements in life.  We can expand them or reduce them. We can set our sights on earning more money or connecting with others and expand our circle of those closest to us.  But time, is time. We simply cannot make more of it than there is. Each of us has a finite amount of it and its value is ever-increasing. The good news is in spite of its illusiveness, time can still be managed. We can choose to see time as a controllable commodity and live our lives according to that assumption. This is one of the secrets of successful people ‑ they work at shaping those things which others think are uncontrollable. There are a number of ways to manage our time.  Setting Priorities is one of them. SETTING PRIORITIES When setting your priorities, there are two famous rules to follow.  The first of these rules is called Parkinson’s Law. It states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for its completion. Parkinson’s Law makes setting priorities twice as important. If you don’t know what your priorities are, your work will expand to fill in the extra time. It will take far longer for you to accomplish much less. The second rule is known as Pareto’s Principle. Pareto’s Principle or the 80/20 rule which means that 80 percent of your results come from 20 percent of your efforts. Pareto’s Principle can be applied in numerous situations. For example: 80 percent of one’s business comes from 20 percent of one’s clients; 80 percent of the attention we receive comes from 20 percent of the people we interact with; and so on.