Ep. 49 How To Prioritize When Everything Is Important
As business owners and leaders, we tend to struggle with prioritization because everything seems urgent, and everything seems important.
And many times, what’s most important to us gets punted to the bottom of the list to make space for everybody else's priorities.
So, how do you make a decision on where to start for maximum productivity whilst making room for the things that light you up?
My strategy for prioritization
I always come back to my goal.
I recommend clients think through all of the tasks and ask themselves, “is this going to help me reach my goal”? Most often our daily tasks are broken down into the four categories below:
Client deliverables
Time-sensitive work
Work in my business
Anything else
Three prioritization strategies I use each day
The Ivy League method: This is a very traditional prioritization technique. Each day list your tasks in order of importance (using the categories above) and work on the list in order. If you don't complete a task, that becomes the first on tomorrow’s to-do list. So it becomes this rolling list that helps ensure that the most important things are staying consistently at the top of your list.
The Eisenhower Matrix: The matrix consists of four boxes on a graph. You have things that are urgent and not urgent, those that are important and not important. Tasks that are urgent and important are done first. The important and not urgent tasks get scheduled on your calendar. Urgent but not important tasks can be outsourced or scheduled. Not important and not urgent tasks can be removed from your list. And if you can't drop it, if it's something that you are excited to do or inspired to do, then this can be added to your brain dump list.
Time Multipliers: A time multiplier is something that you can do today that will make your life easier tomorrow. So it may be an investment in time, energy, and resources now, but it's going to make that work exponentially faster, easier, or negligible later on, meaning you don't have to do it anymore.
How to tell if something is really urgent
It can be a bit of a slippery slope when we think of things as urgent when they're not, and we spend the whole day putting out what we think are fires as an excuse to not dig into the bigger, harder work that we have to do.
And that's when I see people working on really small, meaningless tasks throughout the day because they're procrastinating doing the harder work that they have.
Sometimes we have to be disciplined enough to know that what’s important isn’t always what’s most enjoyable.
To wrap it up, here are the four steps to prioritization
Break down the big projects into smaller tasks: Put the smallest task on your to-do list. Create that plan ensures that that is consistently a priority and you’re not doing a whole lot all at once
Get perspective: Yes, some things need to be dealt with faster than others, but you’ve got to have a really clear perspective on that. Not everything someone else asks you for is an emergency or a priority.
Stop defaulting to putting yourself last on the list: I see this all the time, especially with entrepreneurs, that what's most important to them gets punted to the bottom of the list to make space for everybody else's priorities. And that's really frustrating and will start to wear you down because you're not going to feel excited or motivated to work on the things you wanna do if it's the last thing on your list.
Look for ways to make tasks faster and easier: As always, we can get more done when we're working a little bit faster and easier.
Getting good at prioritization comes with practice, paying attention to what you enjoy doing, and determining the proper cadence of your work in order to stay motivated and stay focused on those priorities.
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