You're Prioritizing Your Work WRONG - How Consultants Actually Do It

People often feel overwhelmed at work, and one of the most underrated skills to address that is prioritization. Let's say you have a full to-do list. How do you know which tasks to work on first? Are you confident you are choosing the right tasks? In these types of environments, this is exactly what I want to discuss today. So, welcome to another coffee break here on my channel FirmLearning. My name is Heinrich. I'm a former McKinsey consultant, later transitioned into C-level roles in the industry, in tech, and now discussing prioritization techniques based on my

humble experience. And let's look at this based on a simple scenario. This, by the way, is how the eye envisions how a consultant looks like working on a to-do list. Let's say that this person wants to work on the to-do list that consists of the following items, which are presented here in no particular order. So, one of the items is that this person wants to conduct a feedback session with a more junior colleague on the team, as it is a very common practice across in professional services, but also most industry companies. Next, this person wants to write a storyline for the next steering committee document for next week, and the team needs this to continue working on this. So, for those of you not experienced in consulting, these steering committees are typically the big milestone meetings every two to three weeks on a consulting project. You are presenting the progress to the project sponsors. Next, you need to hand in your travel expenses that you collected from the last two months. Arguably quite important because for sure you want the money back, right? That you spend on all the travel, hotels, flights that you booked for your work. Next, you need to prepare a briefing for an internal research team to provide some input for an analysis that you want to conduct for the upcoming steering committee. Next, there's a data analysis that you want to prepare based on a data set that you received from the client that you know might need for upcoming meetings, maybe the steering committee or something else as well. And last, but not least, there's an email from a senior client that you received who has a quick question and then wants an answer from you. And I now invite you to pause here. Pause the video and think about this. How would you prioritize all these tasks? Likely this might be more than only one day of work for sure, full day of work if not more. How would you prioritize this? Where would you start? What would you do first? And I will now

use this list to discuss some important prioritization principles that I hope will be helpful to you and also beyond the individual tasks that you see here on this list. So, let's start. What should be the last task on the list? And I would argue that the last thing that you should work on, that you should prioritize are the travel expenses that you collected. And here, the internal rationale is that these are admin tasks, internal admin tasks that just should not be a priority, that should be deprioritized compared to everything else. And of course, this might be different if there's a specific deadline here that needs to be adhered to, but otherwise, this is on the last spot.

Next, the feedback session with junior colleagues on the team. And for sure, this type of activity is important, right? And people-related activities are always also a priority for you as a leader, but compared to the other client-facing, operations-facing work, likely this is what you want to deprioritize for the immediate things that you want

to get done. Next, prepare the data analysis based on a data set you received from a client. For sure, this is more important than the other tasks because this is client-facing and this might now be an activity that you also need as an input, the results of this analysis for the upcoming meetings, for the upcoming steer cos. So, this is what you can do. Here, it's important to realize that this is an activity that likely you can do by yourselves. So, you are not reliant on other people's input. So, this assumes that you already received the data set, which is why this is on position number four. And on position two and three, I would put the tasks where you are creating something, where you are working on something that then other people need as an input to be able to contribute and to work as well. So, essentially, work that needs to get on other people's desks to help them help you. And in this instance, this is the storyline that you need to create for the upcoming steerco because this is then what you will need to send to your team to then actually fill the documents, to fill the slides, create the actual document based on the storyline. And this is also to create the briefing for your internal research team because without this briefing, your internal team will not be able to conduct the work to then provide the inputs that you will need for the steerco as well. And the rationale here is that while the task on number four, on step four, you can do potentially even last minute if this is what you need to do, tasks two and three, you want to do very early because otherwise, the other people cannot in a meaningful way. And whether you now prioritize task two or task three, here I would consider the lead times that the other teams will be working with. So, which task will require the person on the other side actually spend more time on. And so, whether this is actually completing the document based on the storyline or whether this is completing the research based on the briefing, whatever is more complex will take the other person more time. This is what I would do first because then you want to give that person as much capacity as possible, as much time as possible to actually get it done. What we're discussing here today are just some high-level, very basic principles regarding how to increase your productivity and effectiveness at work. And if you're interested in more insights like that to become a more productive professional, to get the next promotion that you deserve, to get that salary increase, this is exactly what we developed our firm learning mentoring program for, where we are I'm together with professionals at different stages of their career to help them achieve their career goals. And if this sounds of interest to you as well, we're offering free initial consultations where you have the opportunity to talk to me or other professionals from our team in a free initial consultation where we're looking at your individual situation and already in this first free session, we're developing a career plan to help you advance at work. If that sounds interesting, there's a link in the video description where I can book your free initial consultation as well. Would be my pleasure to welcome you in the program very soon. And so what's now

on position number one? And our answer on position number one, it is a quick answer to this email from the senior client who confronts you with this question. And the basic underlying principle is that essentially, whatever you can do that takes you less than 5 minutes or so, you want to do it right away. now. You don't want to take the task, maybe even add it then to your to-do list to then work on it later. Just the fact of doing that likely will take you 1 or 2 minutes, right? And then you have this on the list. You will constantly need to think about that. So don't do this whenever it takes you less than 5 minutes or so to get it done. Just do it right away. Take it off your to-do list and then it's done and you don't need to worry about it anymore. And in addition to that, typically, what was a behavioral pattern that I've seen over and over again also with the most senior partners, the arguably most busy people in these consulting firms, is that whenever they received an email from a senior client, they were extremely good at almost always answering right away with in minutes or so. Didn't matter if they were on a meeting, if they were traveling, if they were doing this or that, they found a way to get back to these people super quickly and if only to tell them that they would need to work on it or think about it and they'll get back to them tomorrow. But this high responsiveness was a trait I observed over and over again with the most senior, most successful people in a consulting firm like McKinsey. You do with that whatever you want, but this is what I can share at least based on my humble experience. I'd be also super interested to hear from you any additional principles that you want to add. Please let me know in the comments. Super eager to learn here from you as well. If you took any value out of the video, please just throw the like button, hit subscribe to stay up-to-date on all the content. Big thanks to all the channel members, and see you soon again here on the channel next week.