Task difficulty

When we plan our study, we pay attention to the tasks we must perform most urgently. In a first logical order, it is coherent to start with those that we must deliver more quickly, because they are the ones that exert more pressure on us, but within the order of work we always find ourselves with the problem of deciding whether we should start with the most difficult tasks or the simplest ones.

There is a lot of information on this subject, generally supported by criteria based on the experience of the person issuing it or his or her personal taste. With this guide we intend to provide a more individualized point of view on the subject, so that you have the necessary elements to decide for yourself what is more convenient for you, whether to start with the simpler tasks or the more complex ones.

Energy expenditure

Each task we perform during the day involves an expenditure of energy for our body, which is why deciding whether to start with the simple or the complex can be very decisive in order to achieve the completion of everything proposed for the day.

We believe that energy expenditure is the key factor in making this decision. There are tasks that will be extremely burdensome while others are more mechanical and do not require us to be at full capacity to execute them. The problem becomes more acute with the tasks that are in an intermediate level of difficulty of those mentioned above, where although they are not the most difficult, they do present some difficulty and will take a few hours of our time.

Classify the tasks by their degree of difficulty

We recommend that once you have well defined the tasks to be completed during the day, you proceed to classify them according to their degree of difficulty. To do this, we propose to group them into three groups. High difficulty tasks, medium difficulty tasks and low difficulty tasks.

High difficulty tasks: They require a lot of effort on our part, they are tasks that demand to be at our maximum capacity to execute them, they will take many hours to finish them and will occupy a great part of our energy.

Medium difficulty tasks: They are tasks that require a lot of time to finish, they are not so exhausting, part of their development is mechanical and does not demand the maximum of our capacity, they occupy part of our energy but we can recover after a short rest.

Low difficulty tasks: These are very simple tasks, sometimes they take only a few minutes, they do not take up much of our energy, they are generally mechanical so they do not require us to be at full capacity.

Execute in this order

For the cases in which you have tasks of high difficulty and of medium difficulty:

• We consider it convenient to start with the task of medium difficulty, this taking into account that although it will involve considerable effort, it will be easier for you to recover from this task and start with the task of high difficulty later. If you start with the high difficulty task first, you may become too exhausted to continue with the medium difficulty task later.
• Here we continue with the idea of guaranteeing the accomplishment of both tasks, this being the most coherent way to distribute the energy.

For those cases in which you have tasks of medium or high difficulty, combined with tasks of low difficulty:

• Prioritize accomplishing the high or medium difficulty activities as appropriate and then proceed to perform the low difficulty activities.

• Taking into account the simplicity of the activities of low difficulty, it is better to take advantage of the moments of greater energy and concentration in the more complex activities, since the others can be executed in an easy way, independently of our physical and mental state.