After the tasks are divided, what principles should we use to handle them? Here are some general principles for handling them.
1. Flexibly use the four quadrants of time
If we only use the four quadrants of time to divide tasks, we will find that sometimes we are not working at the highest efficiency if we rigidly follow the quadrants. For example:
(1) You come to the office in the morning and your boss asks you to hand in a PPT of the latest product demonstration in the afternoon. He wants to show it to customers. You think it will take about 2 to 3 hours to complete this task;
(2) Tomorrow morning you need to cut 3,000 1:1 size product pictures and send them to the website so that they can upload the product pictures. It will take you 1 to 2 hours to complete them.
If we follow the four quadrants of time, we should handle the first important and urgent task first. The second important but not urgent task should be postponed. It may take 5 to 6 hours to complete the two tasks, and you may even have to work overtime. This is not necessarily the most efficient way to handle them. In this example, we found that the image processing task is highly parallelizable, because we can use Photoshop’s batch processing function to set commands and automatically crop images in batches. Therefore, when using Photoshop to batch process images, you can do other things at the same time.
Then we can spend a few minutes to set up the image batch processing command, and in the next 1 to 2 hours, the computer will automatically crop the photos, and at the same time, we can also make the product demonstration PPT file required by the boss. In this way, we only need 2 to 3 hours to complete 2 tasks, and the extra time can be used for other work.
2. Do parallel and short-time tasks in advance
Under the premise of not affecting important and urgent tasks, you can violate the four quadrants of time and complete parallel and short-time tasks in advance, such as the above-mentioned, spend a few minutes to set up the image batch processing command.
3. Turn long-term tasks into regular tasks
Why do we do this? Because many people like to treat long-term tasks as sprint tasks, hoping to get them done in a short time. This seems to be efficient, but in fact it has great side effects. For example, when it comes to foreign trade orders, many people hope to get many customers and receive many orders by participating in an exhibition. Therefore, they invest a lot of costs in the exhibition. Once the effect is not ideal, they immediately lose confidence in the exhibition and even lose confidence in the development of the international market.
Foreign trade orders and customer development is a long-term task, which requires a series of links such as customer information collection, customer background investigation, sending development letters and social media marketing, letting customers establish initial trust, customer trial orders, exhibition selection, pre-exhibition training, exhibition scheduling, sending exhibition invitations to potential customers, on-site negotiations, etc. These tasks can be turned into regular tasks.
Turn a long-term order-taking task into a regular task, and you will get twice the result with half the effort in the final stage of receiving orders at the exhibition site, and orders will come in like clouds, thus building confidence in developing the international market.
4. Give priority to temporary tasks
Temporary tasks are often very urgent and must be completed. If this task is short and time-consuming, and you don’t have anything particularly important or urgent on your hands for the time being, solve the temporary tasks first. Because you can’t ignore or escape it. People don’t like unplanned things. If you leave it alone, your brain can’t ignore it and will be distracted. So it’s better to deal with it at the beginning, and then you can concentrate on the planned things.
5. Concentrate time to do short-term tasks
For example, actions such as browsing Moments, liking customers on Facebook and Instagram, checking customer dynamics, posting information in LinkedIn industry groups, etc. to maintain customer relationships can be completed in one hour, such as after lunch. In this way, you can leave enough time to do difficult and valuable things.
6. Do long-term tasks in a whole block of time
Long-term tasks often require concentration and take a long time to complete, so we should try to arrange undisturbed time periods for them.
By handling tasks according to these 6 principles, you can quickly prioritize tasks and improve work efficiency.