Prioritizing Tasks for Productive Time Management
Managing your schedule productively means classifying work by priority and then executing accordingly. In the previous two PM productivity posts, Time Blocking for PMs and Day Theming for PMs, I talked about strong execution with Time Blocking. The real starting point, however, is setting the right priorities.
You do not need to spend much time to decide priorities. What matters most is whether you quickly execute the tasks that you ranked by priority. Below I introduce a simple method, the importance and urgency matrix, and then show how to execute with Time Blocking.
How to set priorities, the Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix sets priorities by two axes, importance and urgency. Based on those, you can split work into four groups: Do for important and urgent, Schedule for important but not urgent, Delegate for not important but urgent, and Delete for neither important nor urgent.
Do and Schedule
Do items are tasks that will cause immediate problems if not handled within a short period. Typical examples are server outages or urgent client requests. These are tasks you must handle right now. If you delay, the stress will spread beyond your work to the whole company.
Schedule items do not create issues today, but they help long term goals. For example, if your long term goal is to build the simplest project management SaaS in the world, then a PM’s work like shaping product vision, building a user community, and running UI research is essential. Skipping them today will not break anything, yet they are necessary for the long run.
Delegate and Delete
Tasks that are not important but urgent should be surfaced quickly and handed to the right teammate. Tasks that are neither important nor urgent should be removed from your list.
Personally, I see Delegate not as “unimportant,” but as “less productive for me within limited time.” If someone else can do it better and faster, I hand it off. As a PM at MOBA I do not create wireframes in tools like Figma. Our designers are better at those tools, and for speed I share sketches and written notes instead. Delegation is not blind offloading. It is a careful part of collaboration where you ask the teammate who can deliver faster than you.
Execute priorities with Time Blocking
Splitting Do and Schedule is often intuitive. If not doing it now will cause a big issue, it is a Do item. If it will not cause a big issue now but is essential to long term goals, it is a Schedule item.
The hard part of productive scheduling is execution. I recommend executing priorities with Time Blocking.
1. Do items now
As covered in Day Theming for PMs, once you know the hours you can control and you keep your Time Blocking slightly loose, you can use the remaining buffer to process Do items immediately.
If you do not handle a Do item right away, issues can surface and the open task will keep adding stress. If another request prevents you from doing it now, save it to your task inbox and move it to the next available high priority slot.
2. Make Schedule items a routine
Schedule items support long term goals, so they are like keeping up with exercise. Turn them into a routine to avoid dropping them. For example, in the hours you fully control, repeatedly set a Time Block to read the newsletters you subscribe to and write down insights. By making a routine in this way, you raise productivity in service of long term goals.