Organise and Complete Daily Work Activities
Identifying tasks
Tasks are what you need to do to achieve your individual goals. These in turn will help achieve the team goals and your goals. The tasks you are expected to do will depend on what you wish to achieve.
As a Career Cricket Player your tasks may be to improve your fitness; improve your batting and bowling skills; or it might be related to marketing tasks if you are the PR person for a company.
Regular tasks
Some of your tasks may be regular where you do the same task at the same time every day, week or month. Examples of these could be stretching exercises first thing in the morning or last thing at night for cooling down. The way you carry out these tasks will probably not change much.
Irregular tasks
Some of your tasks may be less regular. They may be once-off tasks or things that only need to be done on an irregular basis. An example could be volunteering to be part of a team to work on a project to help disabled children. It is likely that these irregular tasks will change - not only what you are asked to do but also how you do it.
You can identify your responsibilities by checking your job specification or job description form. This will help you identify the tasks that you might have to do, whether they are done regularly or irregularly.
Breaking down tasks
Sometimes a task is relatively easy to complete and does not require too much effort on your part. This could apply when you have done the same task over and over again, regardless of the size or difficulty of that task. Other tasks can be very broad, or so big that you do not want to start working on them. You might never have done a similar task before. These tasks should be broken down into smaller, easy-to-do parts. You will not feel so worried about getting started if you can plan for and complete smaller parts of the larger or unfamiliar task.
Prioritising tasks
Prioritising tasks means putting your tasks in the order they should be completed. Setting priorities is not based on what you like doing or what you dislike doing. Quite often people do the things they like doing first, even if they are not urgent. Prioritising is about planning your work day. You need to plan your tasks in order of their importance.
Tasks with deadlines
You may receive a task with instructions on it indicating when it is to be finished. This is relatively easy to prioritise. You have a deadline so you know you have to finish it before that time.
Tasks without deadlines
Sometimes your instructions will be more vague. There will not be a definite deadline given to you. Tasks to be done urgently should get top priority. It is expected that these will be finished straight away, within a relatively short time. Important tasks can be completed after the urgent ones. These need to be done rather quickly. You will even have tasks to do that may be considered a low priority and can be put off to another day.
You should be aware that the order of priority may change throughout your day. Someone may suddenly give you an urgent job. Even if you are working on another urgent task it might mean you have to put that aside. You would need to ask the people who gave you the work whose job is most urgent, in order to decide whose gets top priority.
With experience, you will learn which jobs should be done first, whose work gets priority, what 'today' really means and what 'asap' means. If you are unsure when any of your tasks are to be finished you should check with the person giving you the work. It is better to clarify the deadline rather than not finish something in time.
You might have heard the following sayings: 'Failing to plan is planning to fail' 'Prior planning prevents poor performance'
The time you spend in planning and prioritising your tasks will save you many hours when you start actually carrying out the tasks.
Re-prioritising tasks
Goals can be changed, added or deleted