Any CEO, leadership role, or manager faces considerable critical thinking and pressure daily on making profits, keeping employees and clients happy, growing the business, and innovating or bringing new ideas to the table. While many leaders are good at project, task, and time management, short and long-term success only sometimes follows. This could result mainly because of many leaders' inability to prioritize tasks. To enact effective prioritization, you must be able to manage the entire project's direction on a macro level and individual functions on a micro level.

Project Management Versus Task Management

According to productmanager.org, Product management is "the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements." Task management is "a process where one identifies, monitors, and progresses the work that needs to be done during the day."

To simplify, project management focuses on the entire project, which looks at the larger picture. In contrast, task management focuses on the project's objectives that you must achieve daily, weekly, or monthly. It is hard to do everything simultaneously, and it is a mistake to think about the task and work on it to impact your productivity gains significantly. In business, important goals are usually the larger picture that comes at the end, and effective management can be achieved.

Evaluate current practices

Even if no prioritization plan is set in stone, our mind tends to sort out work in a specific order. Our mind's way of subconsciously giving some tasks importance over others is to have a plan for these priority tasks we have created without realizing it. Take time to provide a thorough evaluation and implement teamwork to increase flexibility. Once we understand our current practices, they can be further developed or tweaked to understand tasks requiring more or less immediate attention.

To understand this method of prioritizing, we must first learn the difference between 'important' and 'urgent' tasks.

 Important "marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence.

Urgent "calling for immediate attention"

Dwight DE. Eisenhower as the 34th president of the United States of America, you can imagine the number of tasks and the amount of pressure on President Eisenhower must have been enormous at the time, and the only way he could efficiently manage all of this was by prioritization. To do this, he created the Eisenhower matrix, which differentiated between important vs. not important and urgent vs. non-urgent; this method aimed to filter out the noise and focus on what was truly important.

• Priority 1 tasks are both urgent and important

• Priority 2 tasks are important but not urgent

• Priority 3 tasks are urgent but not important

• Priority 3 tasks are neither urgent nor important

Important/urgent tasks need to be done immediately and by the leader

Important/not urgent tasks need to be done shortly with a set timeline and by the leader

Not important/urgent tasks are something a leadership position should be able to delegate

Not important/not urgent tasks are something that can be dropped or pushed to a later date

These tasks can change quickly from one quadrant to another, and monitoring those changes is important. If a task in the not important/ not urgent quadrant moves to an important / not urgent quadrant, then clearly, the prioritizing functions have changed, and the leader should act accordingly.

Leading down the chain of command

Creating a leadership chain of command will allow you to delegate tasks to other team members, focus on the most critical work, and leave the rest to teamwork. As an effective leader, it is your job to manage your leadership chain. To delegate appropriate tasks. It is vital to understand which tasks should be done by the leader and which tasks can be delegated. Tasks that are usually confidential, high in value, and require experience or expertise should be done by someone in a leadership position. Delegating tasks is essential to effective prioritization because it is only possible to do so many tasks at a time.

When assigning tasks, you must be able to communicate with your team members. Since you rely on them, you need to be sure they have all the information to get their task done right and effectively. Pass situational awareness up and down the hierarchy of employees through unified command. You do this by breaking down teams into manageable groups with junior leaders. A good leader will empower their junior leaders to lead through trust and confidence. Junior leaders should naturally take the initiative and state, "This is what I am going to do," instead of a mindset where they ask, "What should I do." Get input from team members and junior leaders, and this will empower them and encourage a better culture.

As a leader, it is impossible and leads to low productivity to complete every task and make all the decision-making yourself. Initially, leaders can still be hands-on, but they will eventually have to let go. In business, it is not uncommon to see shrinking resources and increasing demand, and this is where it usually shows how much of a significant impact someone can have on their teams as a leader. A leader can tackle this situation by being less 'involved' and more 'essential.' Being involved' is all about making choices and mandates in the work that is done by the team, and being 'essential' is how well the leader activates people around them to do tasks that lead to both short and long-term success.

Often, a new leader will feel that delegating essential tasks is passing the work on to someone else, therefore acting as a company resource and time waster. When they are, delegating essential tasks is a valuable tool if used properly. It can make workloads more manageable and create an excellent environment to grow and learn.

Why does effective leadership usually feel they can do it better? A study by Pfeffer, Cialdini, et al. found two psychological processes that make someone in a leadership role reluctant to delegate work:

1) The self-enhancement effect is a manager's inclination to prefer a work product when they are more involved in its production.

2) The faith in supervision effect, which is when employees tend to believe that work is performed at a higher level when a supervisor overlooks it

Great leaders always need to be aware of these biases. They can indicate that trust needs to be built with the team.

How to delegate tasks effectively

1. Choosing the right person for the job

As a new leader, it is imperative to understand a team member's strengths and weaknesses. The leader can only delegate the task successfully if they know which team member can take responsibility for the task at hand.

 For example, delegation requires much collaboration with the person taking responsibility; picking someone who likes to work independently will be counterproductive. Another way to delegate is to sit down with the team with a list of essential tasks and allow the team to pick the functions that they think best suit them. Letting people choose the task can help build trust and improve  engagement

2. Explain why you are delegating

If a task or other vital goals are delegated to someone, it is also good to mention why the task is being delegated. Delegating a task is usually a careful and calculated thought. Since some effort goes into selecting the right person, it will be helpful to let them know why they got picked to take up the responsibility.

3. Provide the right instructions

Every effective leader should be able to efficiently and efficiently provide the proper instructions to the team members without micromanaging. By this, we mean providing them with instructions that will let people go out on their own to achieve these tasks, and the instructions provided should enable them to accomplish these tasks with ease.

4. Provide resources and training

As we mentioned earlier, delegating is not passing on responsibility to someone else but more like activating those around you to take up more influence and responsibility and to improve your growth mindset. This requires not only time and trust but also training and resources. Many people have potential, but that is not readily accessible. Great leaders must invest away from time wasters and move towards training and development to unlock their full potential. Relying entirely on ability and talent can hit a ceiling. It works best when these talented individuals get the right resources to carry out their responsibilities effectively.