Essential to all leadership roles is the ability to decide between competing priorities and follow through on your decision. Where do you learn such behaviour? The best place to start is with how you control your own working day.

A simple to-do list is better than nothing: it merely names all the tasks you need to get done, shopping-list fashion. But what you really need to know is what to do when. With the right priority assigned to each item, the humble to-do list is transformed into a much more helpful scheduling tool.

What's required is some system for deciding the priority of each task. The secret is to recognise that there is a big difference between urgent and important. An urgent task is not necessarily important, and important tasks often aren't yet urgent.

Urgent tasks must not be allowed to crowd out important tasks. If they do, you'll find yourself spending your working life on firefighting and trivia - or at worst facing disaster.

For each item you are thinking of putting on your to-do list you need to ask two questions: 'Is it urgent?' and 'Is it important?' With yes/no answers to these questions you are left with four possibilities.

Tasks that are both urgent and important need to be dealt with first. Since they will be your top priority let's call them Priority One. A simple system is just to mark a '1' next to them on your list.

Do Priority One tasks when you have the most energy, and try to achieve some progress on them even if you can't get them completed.

Priority Four tasks, by contrast, are not important, nor are they urgent. Indeed, they are candidates for being left off your list altogether. New managers often have trouble with this idea, but a vital function of management is to knock wasteful tasks on the head.

If a task is neither important nor urgent, you need to ask yourself if it is really worth doing. You may be able to save your own and the company's time by culling it. But if you think a task that's Priority Four now might become important in the future, then note down a date to review it in your diary.

Priority Three tasks - the urgent but unimportant ones - are also potential time wasters. Many phone calls, emails and other interruptions fall into this category.

Try to batch them up so the time you need for more important tasks isn't fragmented. Schedule definite times for dealing with your email and returning phone calls. And turn off your email software's incoming message alert.

Important tasks that are not urgent are Priority Two. They can be a source of more serious trouble. The temptation is to put them off until they become urgent. This assumes you'll have time to deal with them properly later, but you may not. Important but non-urgent tasks such as preparing budgets, training or sorting out an apparently minor people problem can turn nasty if neglected.

Instead, think ahead, and either get started early on some subsidiary part of the task, or schedule a time for action in your diary. Priority Two tasks are often good candidates for delegation. You've got time to do the handover and monitoring properly, and because the task is important it should be useful experience for the team member you've given it to.

Further reading
Mindtools also has useful articles on time management at www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_HTE.htm
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