Day 5:Prioritizing Your Challenge

Prioritizing is how you get the important stuff done.

Without prioritizing, you get sidetracked by doing things that are easy but trivial, or sucked into other people’s priorities, or putting out fires, or you’ve labeled everything as a priority so you make little progress on anything.

Some approaches to prioritizing work better than others. The old ABC method seems too rigid for today’s pace of life. David Allen’s filters, what you have time, energy and resources to do now, are pretty effective. The “Important vs. Urgent” grid is great for reminding us how very non-urgent tasks can be.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, paired comparison is helpful because you look at only two tasks at a time, not the whole dang list. Your priorities are tied to longer term goals, right? So asking whether something will still matter in five years can give you needed perspective.

A tried and true technique is figuring out the ROI (return on investment).

For some of us that’s a little tricky because we do many things that aren’t directly related to money making, such as building our community online. Still, it’s helpful to ask yourself what the underlying purpose of each of your tasks is.

To get around the “everything is important!” mentality, try projecting yourself into the future. Not too far, just to the end of the day. When you look back on your day, what do you feel most satisfied about having done? What felt like the most progress, or the greatest relief to be through with? Make that your top priority.

“It is better to have a bad plan than no plan at all”
Charles De Gaulle

Try all these techniques. Having lots of ways to prioritize is valuable. There’s no need to shoehorn yourself into a style that doesn’t suit you.

Prioritizing is an ongoing activity.

Although things change, you don’t want to go with the flow to the extent that you abandon your own priorities. Most of us work for ourselves and we work alone. We do projects with colleagues and for our clients, but we also have plans and schemes of our own (maybe it’s your Customer Love challenge this month?).

The problem is that we’re usually drawn to working on tasks that involve external deadlines and obligations and our pet projects are at the bottom of the to do list. It can be hard to get motivated to work on something that no one is waiting for. No one is emailing you for a progress report. There won’t be any meetings where you’re expected to update everyone.

It’s up to you to nurture and grow your wee idea.

Give it quality time in your schedule. Take responsibility for its development. Use the ways described here to maintain your priorities.

You don’t have to do this alone! Get support and create structure to help you. Support can be asking for advice on the Customer Love chat, hiring a coach or starting a mastermind group. Structure includes planning to work at a coffee shop for 3 hours on Tuesdays, checking in with a colleague every day and giving yourself regular deadlines (for blog posting, for example).

I’m guessing you started your own business for the same reasons I did; to have freedom and fun. Prioritizing doesn’t need to be a dry, business-like process. Put your tasks on neon colored Post-Its so you can move them around on a board. Get a whiteboard to make Mind Maps on with colored markers.

Doodling, playing, napping and daydreaming are all valid planning techniques and help to bust up brain roadblocks.

Put on a feather boa and let your inner Lola in on the fun; she’s the opposite of stodgy! Don’t worry too much about prioritizing. Treat your to-do list like a meditation and keep gently bringing your attention back to it as you go through your day.

What’s your favorite, fun way to prioritize? Tell me in the comments below!