Risk Management Tips – Avoiding surprises of lower priority tasks

In the daily workload, it’s normal to create a priority list for your tasks and even for the projects you plan to work on. But leaving tasks or projects with lower priority unattended might lead to problems when their time comes.

Seeing a risk early enough is 50% of its resolution.

Here’s what you should do early enough to avoid big surprises in your low-priority tasks:

Never ignore them. Put them in your to-do list.

Don’t ignore the task to the extent that you rely only on your memory or someone reminding you about it. Add it to your to-do list, mark the email (if any) as unread, maybe add a category to it, and set a reminder or alert a few days before its due date.

Assign resources early. Mark the calendar.

If the task isn’t something you’ll do alone and requires someone else to help, assign them early and mark their calendar. Otherwise, when the time comes, it will still feel like a low-priority task and may never get done. If you need someone to attend a meeting, help with an estimation, prepare a document, or even just read something, it’s better they know about it in advance.

Are all the inputs ready? Use a checklist.

When it’s time to start the task, is everything ready? You don’t want your designer to begin work on a design, page, ad, or flyer without the logo, color palette, branding guidelines, or other checklist items. Otherwise, the low-priority task will keep getting postponed until everything is ready. And if it’s something you’re delivering to a client, rescheduling again and again won’t make them happy.

All set and ready? Then ignore it for now.

Really, if you’ve done all of the above, which shouldn’t take more than 5 to 10 minutes, you’re good. You can now ignore it, since it’s a low-priority task anyway. But you’ve done what it takes to avoid any surprises later.

The verdict

So... low-priority tasks can carry hidden surprises that cause delays. To avoid the risks, prepare for them. It doesn’t take much and can save you a lot of trouble later.