Prioritizing for a Highly Effective and Successful Busy Life
 by:
Marjorie Geiser
You are ready to start working on creating or building your
business. For many people, by just asking them what they most want to accomplish
will help them prioritize, but for others, they may still be stumped. HOW do we
prioritize? How can we really determine what is most important? Helping you
answer these questions is the focus of this article.
Being most effective
When people start to think about how best to prioritize,
usually the reason is they want the most results possible out of the time they
have available. Prioritizing includes two steps: Determining what needs to be
done and deciding on the order in which you will do the tasks. To be most
effective, you must weed out the work that does not help you achieve your
ultimate goals. You must be able to separate the tasks that need to be done from
busywork that eats away at our time. Many of these things can be done less
frequently, if at all. We’ll address this in more detail, below. Task
prioritizing means working on the most important tasks first no matter how
tempted you are to get a lot of less essential tasks out of the way.
According to Stephen Covey, in his book, “The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People,” there are four quadrants people generally work in.
These include Important and Urgent, Important and Not Urgent, Not Important and
Urgent, and Not Important and Not Urgent. Before I go any further, can you
identify activities that fit into each of these categories for you? According to
Covey, the most effective category to work in is in Important and Not Urgent.
When you work in this quadrant, you are not solving problems, you are creating
opportunities. According to Covey, if we all worked in this category, it would
be the one thing that would have the greatest impact on our life and our
effectiveness!
Look at your values
You dream of being the professional sought after in your
community and profession for your expertise. You imagine having an incredibly
successful and rewarding business, enjoying the freedom that self-employment
offers. But you’re running ragged right now! You can’t imagine that it really
will develop into what you have dreamed of!
No matter how frantic life gets, the truly successful
people are able to rise above the challenges of short time and pressing
deadlines by maintaining their perspective. What are the things most important
to you? Use your values as your compass to keep yourself on track. Continue to
come back to what your ultimate vision is of having that incredibly successful
and rewarding business, enjoying the freedoms it offers you.
If family and friends are important to you, this is part of
your value system, so be sure that while you’re working on your business, that
you are not short-changing these activities. If keeping your own health and
fitness level optimal is important to you, make sure these activities are
included in your schedule and don’t allow business to nudge them off the
calendar. Where and how you spend your time is part of prioritizing. And this
does not mean that your priorities can’t change, either. Perhaps a friend needs
your time and attention, or your child needs help with homework. You may find
that that time you had blocked out for working on a particular project can be
put off until the time slot you have for tomorrow. If you are working in the
Important and Not Urgent quadrant, you will have more flexibility to do this.
This further points out how identifying your values can help you prioritize.
Achieving goals
When you consider your priorities, you should be
considering how each fits into helping you achieve your goals. Your time is
precious; there is just WAY too little of it, so spending time in the less
effective quadrants means you’re unable to accomplish your goals as quickly as
you would like.
Let’s now look at a few activities that do NOT fit into
this quadrant. As you read these, ask yourself how much time you devote to such
activities.
* Reading listserv or bulletin board emails
* Spending time on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, etc.
* Long phone calls
* Taking care of last minute deadlines
* Saying yes to too much
None of these activities help you achieve your goals most
effectively. Granted, in order to stay current on important issues related to
your business/career, you want to read pertinent newsletters and read what
colleagues and potential clients are talking about. And there will always be the
occasional last-minute project you have to complete. However, in order to
accomplish your high priority goals, all of the above activities must be limited
and controlled. This means that perhaps a long phone call can be scheduled and
planned, but not interfere with more important items such as creating your
business action plans for building up your clientele. When you say yes to
something, always ask yourself, ‘How does this help me achieve my goals right
now?’ If it doesn’t, you can gracefully bow out by just saying, ‘I’m sorry, I
can’t fit it into my schedule right now, but feel free to ask me again in the
future,’ or something along those lines.
Make your list and then narrow it down
I love working with clients in each stage of development.
First they come to me with tons of great ideas and incredible opportunities.
Their biggest problem is figuring out how to organize it all and stay focused on
what they most want to do, and how to actually make it all happen. This is the
first step in prioritizing. You can’t do it all, so where is your BIGGEST
passion?
For these new clients, often I will have them write down
all their ideas, and then mark off the ones that do not answer the question,
“Does this help me achieve my goals right now?” This generally helps them get to
the heart of what they really want to create right now. The others are great
opportunities for later.
These are the basics for the goals and objectives for the
business, and are the building blocks for creating the business plan. The
business plan is then the basis for building a more comprehensive marketing
plan, and the action plans that develop from this. All along the way, you must
ask yourself what is most important.
One trait that many successful business owners share is
their ability to prioritize their activities. They do not put off Important and
Not Urgent activities, and they strive to seldom find themselves in the
situation where they are scrambling to meet a deadline. It is a trait that can
be learned and is one of the important steps to effective time management and
business success. By working through some of the suggestions in this article,
you can be on your way to creating that successful and satisfying business you
have dreamed of, too!
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