This week, we’re going to talk about prioritization! It goes without saying that this is an incredibly common theme that many businesses face, from large corporations down to ‘solopreneurs’. For sales folks, month’s end or year’s end can seem like mad dash. For accounting folks, tax season can be treacherous. Everything needs to be checked off your to-do list by yesterday.
As a small business owner (particularly if you work for yourself, by yourself), you naturally wear many hats. Trying to understand what action items are critical can be difficult because it really seems like everything is a must-do. We’ve pulled together a few tools and tips to help you make smarter decisions about what to tackle first and foremost:
Firstly, know why you need to get this task done. It’s super easy to get caught up doing things that make us feel like we are ‘working’ but we aren’t really moving the needle with our business. In short, make sure your action items are tied to goals that you set, which should be tied back to your mission, which should reflect the vision that you’re hoping to achieve. Here’s a little chart to help out:
Sometimes you might just feel massive overwhelm because you don’t have a solid grasp on everything you need to take care of. Start off by creating a list of everything you need to do (Liquid Planner, 2018). It doesn’t need to be in any particular order at first.
The next step is to comb back through that list and make a difference between the tasks that are urgent vs. the tasks that are important. Urgency means things need to get done NOW otherwise you will have serious consequences (e.g. missing a client deadline, etc.). Not all important action items are necessarily urgent.
If you’re still struggling with this, there is a helpful tool you can use to apply prioritization called the Eisenhower Matrix. You can draw this in whatever notebook or piece of paper you’re using to track your to-do list. Start off by taking that full list of everything you think you need to do and move it into one of these categories - important and urgent, important but less urgent, less important and urgent, less important and less urgent:
Now, here is what you need to do with each of those ‘buckets’ of action items based on the Eisenhower Matrix:
For important and urgent action items — do these first!
For important, but less urgent action items — schedule this in.
For less important and urgent action items — delegate these. Not sure what something like this might be? Maybe you’re called into a meeting but someone else can manage this on your behalf. It’s timely and urgent, but not as important to your day-to-day as someone else’s.
For less important and less urgent action items — try to get these off your list! Why are you wasting your very precious time doing things that aren’t important or urgent?!
How do you prioritize your to-do list? Comment below and share your tips!