Managing Priorities and Deadlines Training Course

Duration 5 days 10 modules · 33 contact hours
Level Intermediate Certificate on completion
Who attends Project Coordinators, Team Leaders and others
Fee from USD 1,100 KSh 95,000 for Kenyan organisations
Where 52 cities + online See dates by city
Next start 7 Nov 2026 Course code SD-PE-003

Before you join: Participants should have at least six months of experience managing their own workload, responding to work requests and meeting routine deadlines.

Dates & prices

Two start dates a month in every city, and live online on weekdays or weekends. Fees are per participant; classroom fees include tuition, materials, lunch and refreshments, and the certificate.

Suggest a date or city

Showing the next six months. Later dates, other cities and private deliveries for your team are available on request.

Course overview

Professionals are often expected to progress several assignments at once while responding to urgent requests, meetings, changing stakeholder demands and limited capacity. The result can be reactive work patterns, missed handovers, poor visibility of commitments and important work being displaced by immediate noise. Managing priorities and deadlines requires more than a task list: it requires clear criteria for deciding what matters, reliable planning routines and timely conversations about trade-offs.

This course equips participants to assess competing demands, rank work using the Eisenhower Matrix and MoSCoW prioritisation, estimate effort, sequence dependent tasks and protect focused work time. Participants learn to convert requests into defined commitments, use weekly and daily planning cycles, identify deadline risks early and communicate realistic delivery dates. The course also addresses interruptions, email and meeting overload, delegation, workload escalation and recovering control after plans change.

Teaching combines short instructor briefings with realistic workplace cases, planning simulations, peer review and individual application planning. Participants work with examples such as a bank project team balancing regulatory actions and client requests, an NGO programme manager coordinating donor reporting, and a corporate operations lead managing service issues. Each participant leaves with a personal priority-management system, a weekly planning template, a deadline-risk checklist and an action plan for applying the methods to current work.

The course suits professionals who manage their own workload while coordinating commitments with colleagues, managers, clients or project teams. It is particularly relevant where deadlines are fixed, requests arrive through multiple channels and work must be reprioritised without losing accountability.

What you will be able to do

  • Apply the Eisenhower Matrix to rank competing tasks by urgency and importance
  • Define deliverables, acceptance criteria and due dates for incoming work requests
  • Build a weekly work plan using timeboxing, capacity estimates and protected focus periods
  • Sequence dependent activities using milestone planning and critical-path thinking
  • Use MoSCoW prioritisation to agree scope trade-offs with stakeholders
  • Identify deadline risks through workload reviews, dependency checks and early-warning indicators
  • Communicate realistic commitments, constraints and revised dates using structured status updates
  • Create a personal priority-management system for daily, weekly and monthly review

Benefits of attending

For you

  • Spend more time on important work rather than repeatedly reacting to urgent requests
  • Set achievable delivery dates with clearer evidence of effort and dependencies
  • Reduce last-minute deadline pressure through earlier risk identification and escalation
  • Handle interruptions, email and meeting demands without losing planned work time
  • Explain workload trade-offs confidently to managers, colleagues and clients

For your organisation

  • Fewer missed internal and client-facing deadlines
  • Earlier visibility of workload bottlenecks and delivery risks
  • Clearer ownership, handovers and acceptance criteria for assigned work
  • More consistent prioritisation of regulatory, customer and strategic commitments
  • Reduced rework caused by unclear requests, rushed decisions and unmanaged changes

Course modules

10 modules over 5 days

Participants can turn incoming work into visible, defined commitments with clear ownership and dates.

  • Work intake mapped across email, meetings, systems and informal requests
  • Task versus commitment distinguished through deliverables, owners and acceptance criteria
  • Commitment register built with due dates, dependencies and stakeholder expectations
  • Request clarification questions used before accepting ambiguous or incomplete work
  • Definition of done established for recurring and one-off assignments
  • Single trusted task list maintained without duplicating information across channels

Participants can rank work using explicit criteria rather than urgency alone.

  • Eisenhower Matrix applied to urgent, important, delegable and deferrable work
  • MoSCoW categories used to distinguish essential scope from desirable additions
  • Priority criteria weighted for risk, value, obligation and time sensitivity
  • Urgency bias recognised when recent requests displace planned commitments
  • Regulatory, customer and operational consequences compared before reprioritising work
  • Priority decisions recorded with rationale, owner and review date

Participants can assess available capacity and make realistic workload commitments.

  • Available hours calculated after meetings, recurring duties and planned absence
  • Effort estimates separated from elapsed time and external waiting periods
  • Planning fallacy countered through reference-class estimates from similar assignments
  • Work-in-progress limits set to prevent excessive concurrent task switching
  • Capacity buffer reserved for incidents, approvals and unavoidable interruptions
  • Weekly workload forecast compared against committed deadlines and milestones

Participants can sequence work around milestones, dependencies and fixed delivery dates.

  • Backward planning starts with delivery dates and required acceptance steps
  • Milestones defined as observable decisions, handovers or completed outputs
  • Dependencies mapped between inputs, approvals, reviews and downstream activities
  • Critical-path thinking identifies tasks that directly determine the finish date
  • Lead times allowed for procurement, stakeholder response and quality review
  • Deadline assumptions documented before work plans are shared

Participants can establish planning routines that connect daily actions to major commitments.

  • Weekly review reconciles commitments, priorities, capacity and emerging constraints
  • Timeboxing assigns focused work periods to high-value planned tasks
  • Daily top-three list limits attention to achievable priority outcomes
  • Calendar blocks protect preparation, analysis and deadline-critical production work
  • Batch processing reduces disruption from email, approvals and administrative tasks
  • End-of-day reset captures unfinished work and prepares the next day

Participants can protect concentration while remaining responsive to legitimate urgent needs.

  • Interruption audit identifies triggers, sources, frequency and recovery time
  • Triage rules distinguish genuine emergencies from requests needing scheduled responses
  • Notification settings aligned with availability windows and escalation arrangements
  • Meeting agendas tested against required decisions, participants and preparation needs
  • Pomodoro Technique used selectively for concentrated work and planned breaks
  • Boundary statements communicate response times without appearing unhelpful or unavailable

Participants can allocate work clearly and follow up without unnecessary control.

  • Delegation decisions match task risk, capability, authority and development needs
  • RACI roles clarify who does, approves, consults and receives updates
  • Delegated tasks specified through outcomes, constraints, checkpoints and completion dates
  • Check-in frequency matched to risk, experience and task uncertainty
  • Handover checklist captures status, files, decisions, contacts and outstanding actions
  • Accountability maintained without reclaiming work at the first difficulty

Participants can negotiate priorities and delivery commitments using clear evidence and options.

  • Trade-off conversations frame choices between scope, time, quality and capacity
  • Status updates report progress, blockers, decisions needed and next milestones
  • Requesters offered options to defer, delegate, reduce scope or extend dates
  • Escalation messages state impact, evidence, recommended action and decision deadline
  • SBI feedback structure addresses priority conflicts and unhelpful working behaviours
  • Stakeholder expectations reset when assumptions, dependencies or requirements change

Participants can identify threatened deadlines early and organise practical recovery actions.

  • Deadline-risk indicators include missed milestones, unclear ownership and growing rework
  • Traffic-light status criteria defined using evidence rather than personal confidence
  • Root-cause analysis separates capacity, scope, dependency and quality problems
  • Recovery plans sequence immediate containment, revised actions and stakeholder communication
  • Contingency actions prepared for absent approvers, delayed inputs and system failures
  • Lessons learned captured after deadline incidents to improve future planning

Participants can combine course methods into a repeatable personal system and application plan.

  • Personal workflow designed from work intake through review and closure
  • Weekly dashboard combines commitments, capacity, risks and stakeholder actions
  • Decision rules documented for accepting, declining and escalating new requests
  • Habit cues scheduled for daily reset and weekly planning review
  • Application plan targets one current workload problem and measurable improvement
  • Thirty-day review dates set for refining methods and sustaining new routines

Exercises and examples are adapted to each cohort's sectors and roles.

What you take back to work

  1. Personal priority-management system
  2. Weekly capacity and commitment planner
  3. Eisenhower Matrix decision guide
  4. MoSCoW stakeholder trade-off template
  5. Deadline-risk and escalation checklist
  6. Thirty-day workload improvement plan

Who should attend

  • Project Coordinators — balancing dependencies, milestones and requests from multiple contributors
  • Team Leaders — assigning work, monitoring commitments and resolving workload conflicts
  • Operations Managers — maintaining service deadlines amid interruptions and changing demand
  • Programme Officers — coordinating reporting, partner actions and donor deliverables
  • Business Analysts — managing concurrent requirements, reviews and stakeholder feedback
  • Professional Services Staff — protecting billable delivery time while handling client requests

Skills and tools covered

Priority settingDeadline planningWorkload forecastingStakeholder communicationFocus managementTask delegation

Tools and standards

Eisenhower Matrix, MoSCoW prioritisation, RACI matrix, Pomodoro Technique

How the course runs

Training methodology

The course uses short briefings to introduce priority, planning and communication methods, followed by case work based on competing deadlines and limited capacity. Small-group exercises examine task backlogs, changing requirements and workload conflicts. Simulations practise negotiating scope, escalating risks and resetting delivery dates. Participants apply the methods to their own work patterns through individual planning periods, peer feedback and a practical action plan. The instructor adapts cases to the participant group’s sector and operating context.

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have at least six months of experience managing their own workload, responding to work requests and meeting routine deadlines. They should be able to identify their current tasks, regular meetings and typical sources of interruption. Experience of supervising others is helpful but not required. No formal project management qualification, specialist software knowledge or prior study of productivity methods is required. Participants should bring examples of current commitments or a current work plan, provided organisational confidentiality requirements permit this.

A typical training day

08:30 – 10:30First session
10:30 – 10:45Refreshment break
10:45 – 12:30Second session
12:30 – 13:30Lunch and networking
13:30 – 15:00Third session
15:00 – 15:15Refreshment break
15:15 – 16:30Workshop and daily review

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in East Africa Time, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

  • Instruction by a practitioner facilitator
  • Full course workbook and materials
  • Exercise files, templates and case studies
  • Refreshments and lunch on classroom deliveries
  • Certificate of completion
  • Post-course application plan

Frequently asked questions

Participants need routine experience of managing tasks, meetings and deadlines in a professional role. No project management qualification or specialist productivity software knowledge is required.

Participants should bring examples of current tasks, recurring commitments and deadlines, subject to confidentiality rules. A laptop or paper planning materials may be used according to the delivery format.

It suits professionals who must manage several assignments, stakeholders or deadlines at the same time. It is useful for individual contributors, coordinators, managers and professionals working in project, operational or client-facing roles.

This course focuses on personal and team-level workload control: deciding priorities, protecting time, handling requests and communicating trade-offs. Project management courses usually focus more heavily on project governance, schedules, budgets and formal project controls.

Participants build a priority system around their own current commitments and identify one workload problem to address after the course. They leave with templates for weekly planning, deadline-risk review and escalation conversations.

The five days provide approximately 32.5 contact hours, normally delivered from 08:30 to 16:30. Time is divided between instructor input, cases, planning activities, simulations, peer discussion and individual application planning.

Questions about this course?

Ask about dates, fees, group bookings or running it for your team. Our training team replies by email.

Ask on WhatsApp info@skillsetdevelopment.com

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