How to prioritize tasks for a team

When it comes to project and task management there’s a big difference between learning how to prioritize tasks at work, on an individual level, and how to prioritize the tasks of multiple actors across an entire retail business.

If you’re looking for the former we’ve got a full article diving into how to keep track of tasks at work where we tested different methods for keeping track of work tasks. But if you want to learn how to prioritize tasks for a group of people and lead your retail business to success, then you’re in the right place.

How to prioritize tasks for your team in 5 simple steps

When you need to prioritize tasks on behalf of a team there’s a few more parts involved than if you’re just keeping track of your own tasks, but even so there’s a simple recipe you can follow to make sure that everything is covered. 

This involves the following five steps:

1. Identify and categorize tasks
2. Evaluate urgency 
3. Determine dependencies
4. Schedule tasks and allocate time
5. Monitor progress, adapt and reassess

1. Identify and categorize tasks

Identifying tasks is a natural first step whether you need to prioritize tasks for yourself or for a bigger group of people. The difference, when you’re prioritizing tasks for a team, is that before you move into the next step you need to sort the different tasks into categories.

The categories will usually be based on which type of employee or which team member can complete the task in question.

2. Evaluate urgency

After you’ve listed and categorized tasks you need to evaluate the potential impact¢ of each task against your primary goals. Tasks that contribute more towards the goals like increasing sales, customer satisfaction or operational efficiency should have a higher priority than other tasks.

A good way to evaluate urgency is to employ the Eisenhower model, which is a system where you place your tasks in a simple graph with cartesian coordinates where the x-axis usually defines the level of importance and the y-axis defines urgency.

Where the tasks fall on the graph tells you how you need to approach them. Tasks that are important and urgent need to be assigned and carried out fast, important but not urgent tasks need to be scheduled etc.

3. Determine dependencies

While task dependencies also factor in when you prioritize tasks on your own behalf, they become much more important when we’re talking about how to prioritize tasks for a team.

Task dependency can be anything from getting approval from a specific team member before the task can be completed, to needing a different task to be completed before the specific one can be started. And when you are figuring out how to prioritize tasks at work for an entire team, failing to determine dependencies will make it impossible to schedule and assign tasks without creating bottlenecks.

4. Schedule and allocate time

After you’ve prioritized tasks based on urgency, and have made sure you understand which dependencies are at play, you need to assign tasks in your task management system and schedule them in the team’s calendar.

5. Monitor progress, adapt and reassess

After the tasks have been assigned to the team members, you need to monitor progress, and adjust the task list based on new information, or sudden changes in priorities or circumstances.

How do you prioritize tasks when everything seems important?

If you find yourself in a position where all tasks seem to be near equal in both urgency and importance, you can try to focus on impact when you need to find out which tasks to prioritize.

Start by identifying your primary goal, as this will help you figure out the impact of each task.

If you work in marketing, your primary goal might be leads or MQLs, and if you’re managing a retail store sales and/or customer service would probably be your primary goal.

After you’ve identified the goal, you can prioritize your list of tasks by how much they will impact the goal in question. For the marketer, the email blast would ostensibly generate more leads than a visual rebrand.