Episode Details
Back to EpisodesHow To Prioritize Your Work (And Estimate Task Time)
Description
Podcast 339
How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 339
Hello, and welcome to episode 339 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything’s urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take?
Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible.
Before I answer the question, I’d like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe.
I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it’s any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book.
So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode.
Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take?
The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not.
You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning.
This is why I don’t recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you’ll struggle to do two or three of them.
I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words.
I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I’m going to get something done. And that’s good enough.