Hi everyone. 

Let’s talk about priorities. As a business owner, I’m sure you have a long list of tasks that are due soon. How do you prioritize which tasks need to be done first? 

You may be stressed and overwhelmed from trying to do so many things at once. I used to be like that too when I was still improving the infrastructure of my business. I wanted to launch a membership and an online course, and then think about a new program-- I just had too many ideas. From this experience, I learned that if your attention gets shifted between too many things, you won’t be able to deliver on one specific task. 

I read a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan and it helped me organize my tasks and avoid feeling stressed and overwhelmed. According to the book, you should ask yourself this every morning: What is the one thing that you need to accomplish today? 

I have a list of tasks in Asana and I choose three tasks every day that I put in order according to importance. I always focus on task #1 first and proceed to the next one only after finishing it. Once I’m done with task #2, I proceed to task #3. So that’s how I become productive: I focus on one task at a time.  

Think about the 80/20 rule. If you aren’t familiar with it, it says that you should spend 80% of your time to do the 20% of the tasks that are going to move the needle in your business. This is where prioritizing comes in. 

Let’s go back to my question earlier: How do you decide which are your most important tasks? Well, you must identify which tasks will help your business move forward.  

Do you really need to have business cards? Sure, it’s nice to hand them to people to introduce your business and distinguish it from your competitors, but creating business cards takes a lot of time. Instead of spending hours designing an attention-grabbing logo or looking for a nice font, why don’t you focus on attending a networking event or marketing your business on social media? 

If you’re selling an online course, do you really need to complete and polish the last module? No, you have to sell the course first. You need to make sure that you have customers who will be taking the course and then you can focus on planning it down to the last detail.  

Delegating tasks is also helpful. If you need to edit pictures or videos and you think that someone can do it better and faster than you, you can hire a photo/video editor so that you can focus on your bigger tasks. Remember, you should expend your energy on the 20% of tasks that are going to move the needle in your business.  

In my membership and coaching programs, we always have 90-day initiatives because it’s long enough to see if things are working or not. I usually pick out 3-7 of the most important tasks and focus on them for the whole quarter. You can try it out too! Think of 3-7 things that need to accomplish in July, August, and September. You can build your online platforms, create a membership program, or anything that will help your business move forward and just focus on that. If you receive proposals or any additional tasks, why not put them on the back burner for now and pick them up after you accomplished all your 3-7 tasks? 

Focusing on one task at a time will help simplify things, make you more productive, and get rid of any stress and overwhelm that you’re feeling at the moment. 

If you’d like to discuss these strategies further, feel free to send me an email. I’d love to hear which tasks you’ve come up with for the next quarter! 

Have a nice day and see you next time!