Here's how you can manage competing priorities and still meet your deadlines.

Understanding the Eisenhower Matrix can further enhance your ability to prioritize tasks effectively. This tool helps you categorize tasks into four quadrants: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. By visualizing your tasks in this way, you can allocate your time more efficiently, ensuring that critical tasks receive the attention they deserve while minimizing the impact of distractions. This structured approach not only boosts productivity but also reduces stress by providing a clear roadmap for task management.

There is no fixed rule in prioritising, as realtime is dynamic. Assess each priority in context. Context can change urgency, and make less important tasks urgent. Like a deadline to submit a query recently issued by your regulator, can make other important tasks lower in priority, or create a need to pull in more resources to handle other tasks.

Planning is more than just work breakdowns and schedules with milestones. Ensuring right path with applied principles of ‘first time right’ ‘least resistance’ ‘least waste’ ‘avoid rework’ should also be applied to planning.

Multitasking can work efficiently in the operational area. That too when the work instructions/specifications are clearly laid out, tried and tested so that they can be mechanically performed.

If you have a hard time saying no and setting limits, identify your limiting beliefs and reprogram them into more neutral or life-enhancing beliefs! For example: "If saying no means I'm letting people down and not doing my job" → "Saying no means I'm prioritizing my time effectively, which benefits both myself and others."

Delegating is GREAT. But, what if you don't have anyone to delegate to? 👉 It’s a different story when you’re not the “boss,” right? The truth is, delegation isn't only top-down. You don't need formal authority to ask for help or lend a hand. Consider: - Upward Delegation - Lateral Assistance Negotiate with supervisors to redistribute tasks so you can focus on high-impact priorities to improve team performance. Leverage metrics to make your case. Form support networks. Build reciprocal relationships where colleagues lend assistance, not just when asked but as a regular practice. And, if you’re a "perfectionist" 😉 shed the lone wolf mentality. Delegation isn't giving up responsibility, but rather working smarter for shared success.

Before delegating, make sure to PRIORITIZE! Before delegating tasks, ALWAYS take the time to reassess them and determine their importance, whether they can be simplified, or if they can be eliminated altogether. Consciously or unconsciously, when we delegate, we may not prioritize as much as we would if we were doing the task ourselves because we won't be the ones executing it.