Prioritization Skills that Every Working Parent Needs

As a human, you are endlessly bombarded by demands on your time and resources. It doesn’t matter if you’re a parent or not, if you work or not, if you’re a man or a woman. All of us have finite time, money, and energy. 

Although everyone has to make tradeoffs, the stakes can seem higher for working parents. Suddenly it’s not just your dinner date and the big client meeting you’re juggling – it’s your dinner date, big client meeting, and tiny humans you love more than life itself. No big deal, right? 

If you don’t make deliberate decisions about your priorities, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Faced with an endless to-do list, you might find yourself doing nothing instead of something – anything. Fortunately, you can learn to manage conflicting priorities in a way that will help you be more productive while feeling more tranquil. 

How do you manage conflicting priorities?

Let’s pretend that you’ve arrived at your desk for the day. It’s 9 am. You have no meetings on the calendar and a long list of tasks to do. What should you tackle first? 

Do you feel paralyzed and end up on social media? Or do you dive in without taking a moment to think? Instead of jumping in headfirst or staying on your deck chair, you need to find the middle ground. Take some time to review your action items and assess each one. 

For your to-do list, ask yourself these questions:

• How important is this to my company/family/self/spouse?
• When is it due? How flexible is the due date?
• How long will it take?
• Am I the only one who can do this? If not, should I delegate it? 

I follow a few heuristics that help me organize my thinking.  I’m a consultant, so client tasks always takes priority over internal work. Here’s how I prioritize at work:

• Client work trumps internal work
• Fixed due date trumps flexible due date
• Knock out quick assignments rather than shuffling them around my to-do list
• Delegate or automate anything that appears on my list regularly

Your list of priorities might look a bit different, but you should develop your own set of rules for what takes priority. That way, you won’t have to think about it every time. 

For example, suppose you own a retail store. The customer always comes first – so you might make a rule to immediately drop back office work when a customer walks in the door. Think about what is of importance to your business and structure your priorities around that. 

Prioritizing Life with Large Time Blocks

Working parents are pulled in many different directions. Suppose you’re at work one day and have a free hour. You could schedule your child’s summer camps or work on an internal work project. It’s super tempting to work on the “home” stuff during work hours, and sometimes that is required (if you’re trying to work with offices that close at 5). 

In general, though, I prefer to simplify my choices by allocating blocks of the day to different types of priorities. Here’s what my blocks look like:

6-6:45 am: Me (workout, coffee)

6:45 am – 9 am: Family (breakfast and bus stop together, walk dog)

9 am – 5 pm: Work 

5 pm – 8 pm: Family

8 pm – 11 pm: Husband, Me, or Work Catchup

Any chunks of free time on the weekend are typically devoted to House (decluttering, tidying, folding Laundry Mountain, etc.) but most weekend hours are about Family. 

This broad set of priority blocks helps me narrow the choices. I really don’t feel guilty about prioritizing my family from 5 pm – 9 pm. I’ll work if I really have to (something is important and urgent enough) during that time but it has to be pretty big to override my main priority during that time. 

Using this method will make it easier for you to make choices. You’ll no longer find yourself wondering whether to finish that work report or read your kid a book. The choice will be obvious and you won’t feel pulled in different directions. Learning how to prioritize your life – and work – is the key to tranquility as a busy working parent.  

Overrides

I have a few things that I call overrides – that is, things that can override a time block’s main priority. Sick kids are a great example. Normally, work is my priority during the workday, but if I have a sick child, that overrides work. I’ll work as much as I can but my kid will be the main focus.

Another example might be a super important work event. A few years ago, I was trying to single handedly save a project. The client would be at our office for a meeting at 9 am on Wednesday and the presentation deck wasn’t done on Tuesday at 5 pm. Although that would normally have been my family time, I skipped dinner and worked until midnight to get that presentation done. 

Overrides shouldn’t become business as usual. I experience an override no more than 4-5 times per year. (Your mileage may vary depending on your child’s age and how much they get sick.) 

Learning How to Prioritize

Even if you don’t feel like you’re good at it right now, prioritization skills can be learned. I think that my training as an economist really helped me develop this muscle, but it’s something anyone can do. 

First, Get Clear on Your Values

Effective prioritization is a set of value judgements. Here’s a good example from my day today. As I was driving home from work, I went over my mental checklist:

• Pick up groceries
• Put away groceries
• Walk dog
• Pick up kids
• Get gas
• Eat dinner

OK, cool. I can do this! Here’s how I applied my rules to decide what to do, when.

• Pick up groceries: It’s most efficient to do it on the way home, no question here.
• Put away groceries: I could get the kids first, but they always complain when I pick them up early from aftercare. It’s faster to put away the groceries without kids. And the dog really needs to go out. Decision made: I’ll go home to put the groceries away and let the dog out before I pick up the kids.
• Walk dog: Since I’ll be at home I might as well walk the dog before picking up the kids. 
• Get gas: OK, the dog didn’t go to the bathroom on our short walk and I know she has to go. I’ll get gas and see if she’ll go at the gas station. Success! I get gas and the dog pees. 
• Pick up kids: I pick them up around 5:45 and they’re happy. So much craft time.
• Eat dinner: That had to wait until the kids were home so no question here either. 

Does that make sense? I could have easily picked the kids up right after getting the groceries if it was faster or I wanted more time with them or I knew someone wasn’t feeling well. I also put some fixed points in there to make sure I didn’t overwhelm myself with choices. 

There was no choice but to pick up groceries on the way home. Put away groceries comes after pick up groceries, of course. And dinner comes after picking up kids. Other tasks are somewhat flexible but at least I’d given myself something to work with.

Another wrinkle: someone invited me to a work call at the same time all of this action was going down. Could I possibly have prioritized that instead? No, I couldn’t have. I didn’t even give it a thought since I had sent out the required information already and knew someone else would be on the call in my place. 

Pay attention to how you feel after you make choices

Sometimes you make the wrong choices when you’re practicing newfound prioritization skills. That’s OK! It’s how you learn to prioritize. Just pay attention and you will soon figure it out.

For a while, I would try to check my email at the breakfast table in the morning. Well that felt bad because I wasn’t engaging with my family. And nine times out of ten I wasn’t doing anything business critical. Result? Work email banned between 6:45 and 8:45 am. 

You can usually tell when you’ve made a prioritization mistake. Sometimes it’s as obvious as a missed deadline or an unhappy boss. Other times – especially when we decide against our families – it’s more of a gut feeling. It’s OK to pay attention to that feeling. That’s how you learn to prioritize! 

A Note on Jobs vs Family

Some people find themselves in jobs that require them to prioritize work more than they would like to. In an intense job, you might find work taking priority from 8 am to 10 pm. Learning to prioritize better cannot help you with this. There isn’t a quick fix.

If you’re in this situation and it makes you uncomfortable, you need to do some soul searching. Think about your family’s priorities, and talk with them. When your overall time balance doesn’t feel right for you, it might be time for you to make some more systemic changes. 

Learning How to Prioritize Your Life

We’re always making tradeoffs on how we spend our time, energy, and money. This concept is especially critical to working parents who have about three jobs to do on any given day. First, you need to get clear on your values. Then, help minimize the number of decisions you have to make by blocking time for certain aspects of your life. 

Develop your own rules of thumb to help you make choices simpler (e.g. client work trumps internal work). Finally, you need to listen to your gut when you make choices. As you practice and pay attention to how your prioritization choices turn out, you’ll get better and better at prioritizing tasks.