Practical Leadership Tools: How to prioritize tasks based on impact
Most people’s jobs contain competing projects and demands. Here’s a way to work out what to focus on and what to stop doing.
Written by Ben French | Leadership consultant, executive coach, and founder of Ordinary Leadership.
Everyone I’ve ever met struggles with how to allocate their time effectively. That’s because most people’s jobs are characterized by a constant stream of competing demands.
Knowing how to manage your time and effort can be challenging. But a simple tool can help you work out what to focus on and what to stop doing.
Introducing the impact-effort matrix in six simple steps
An impact-effort matrix is a decision-making tool that will help you prioritize tasks based on their potential impact and the effort required to implement them.
Here are six simple steps you can take to develop an impact-effort matrix for yourself or your team:
- Gather all your activities — projects and tasks — on post-it notes (or a piece of paper if doing it alone).
- Draw the impact-effort matrix on a large sheet of paper: a grid with four quadrants, based on the overlap between effort and impact (see the graphic above.
- Agree the criteria for impact and effort.
- Get everyone to put their post-it’s on the grid silently and see what alignment emerges. If you are doing this alone it can help to bring in an outside voice to challenge your thinking.
- Discuss where your team members have put their projects and work and whether this seems right. Refer to the criteria when there is disagreement.
- Once you have 80% agreement, look at where all the tasks are. Then focus the conversation on allocating effort, and if there is anything you or your team should stop doing.
When doing this last step, it’s useful to think about the boxes in the following way.
Understanding more about this tool
The key to making an impact-effort matrix work is to agree objective criteria to define what effort and impact look like.
You can do this by asking what constitutes impact: is it more revenue, social impact, or on-time delivery, for example? And what does effort mean? Is it the time that a task takes to do or the thinking time around it?
Write down these criteria so you can check in on progress, even if you are using the tool just for yourself. This is the key to staying on track.
If this is a new concept to you, why not try developing an impact-effort matrix for your own work initially? You will find it an effective way to surface your preferences and identify where you might be spending too much time when you could be having a more significant impact elsewhere.
When you are ready, try using the tool with your team to clarify what everyone is working on and help prioritize tasks. In this context, an impact-effort matrix can help surface individual, subjective preferences about which projects should take precedence. It can also resolve conflicts and improve your team’s focus.
Learning more
If you want to deepen your understanding, here is a good summary of the benefits of using an impact-effort matrix, and here’s more on using an impact-effort tool within a team. Six Sigma’s insights on the impact-effort matrix is also worth reading.
Ben French is a leadership consultant and executive coach who specializes in organizational development. He is the founder of Ordinary Leadership.
