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Today’s talking points:

You cannot treat everything like it is a priority because everything can’t be a priority.⁣ I’m sharing exactly how to prioritise your tasks effectively and explaining why your thoughts are just as important as your plan.

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I’m going to be diving into one of the questions I get asked the most about prioritising tasks.

How do I decide what projects to do first? How do I stay focused? How do I know what to work on? How do I plan? How do I figure out what tasks to do? How do I figure out what to do first?

Does any of those sound familiar?

I’m going to walk you through some key, actionable strategies, including:

How to always make sure you’re staying within your productive cycle
How to develop the skill of taking action consistently
Where the bulk of planning work really comes from
Improving your mindset around how you think about your tasks and plans

PLUS I’ll be sharing a tangible exercise that will help you prioritise your tasks quickly and easily.

Let’s get ready to boss it!

stop thinking and start executing more

When we go down the perfectionist road of trying to figure out all of the right things to do, we become very slow, we become very indecisive, and it actually takes us a lot longer to create the results that we want.

Instead of trying to stick to the ‘right’ order of doing things, you want to stay in your productive cycle.

Your productive cycle is where you are outputting things, testing things, spending a lot of time creating assets, and putting things out into the world. You are taking action, you are executing your 90-day plan.

When you're in your productive cycle, you want to stay out of confusion land and avoid the broken cycle of overthinking and self-doubt at all costs.

One of the best skills you can learn as a business owner is how to take action consistently and stay in your productive cycle. One of the ways of doing this is by looking at what you're actually outputting. Look at the action you're taking, are you actually putting things out into the world?

Honestly, if you focused on increasing your output by 10x you would solve a lot of your problems because if you're trying to 10x your output, you're not going to have time to doubt yourself and fall into the broken cycle.

get calm, get certain

Being able to create and implement a plan as an entrepreneur is one of the best skills you can develop - it will make you a lot of money.

But it’s not always easy.

A lot of us make a plan we’re excited about, but eventually, the shiny newness of it wears off and we’re filled with doubts and confusion about what we should do next. We get off our productive/ output cycle and fall into confusion land.

It’s important to remember here that the most important part isn’t the plan. It’s you sticking to the plan and staying in that productive cycle.

How do you stay in your productive cycle?

By managing your thoughts. Going back to how you felt when you first set your plan (excited, motivated, inspired, energised etc) again and again for the entire 90 days of the plan. That’s the work.

That’s where I see people get it wrong. They think they need to spend their time getting all the tasks right on the plan, instead, the majority of their time and energy should be spent noticing their thoughts.

get practical

Here’s a hack to prioritising your tasks. Try this exercise:

Make a list of all the things you can think of that you can work on in your business. Set a timer for three to five minutes, and brain-dump everything. It should be long. Anything that you want to do in your business, big projects, little projects, tweaks, literally anything that you can think of.
Then, mark each item on your list as either high impact or low impact. (High impact = This could change the trajectory of my business. Low impact = Low priority, it won’t change much in my business). You have to make your best assessment here.
Once you've done that, you're going to go back through the list to mark the tasks that are going to take a lot of time.
Finally, once everything's marked, you're going to go back through your list to look for high-impact projects with low time; these are going to make the biggest difference that you can do in the least amount of time. That's how you prioritise.

This task will give you a reference as you’ll likely find that your low-impact projects take a lot of time and that’s what you’ve been prioritising.

This is a super easy exercise to help you prioritise tasks, but again, it's not really about finding the exact right tasks it's about you being able to pick something and then aligning your thoughts up long enough to be able to execute them.

money making activities

The next thing is being aware of what creates customers and being focused on money-making activities.

A lot of business owners that I work with are focused on the wrong metrics, looking at email subscribers, page views, followers etc. The thought process behind that is if they increase these metrics, they will increase sales.

Don't get me wrong, these metrics have a place and I do track them. However, if you are just focusing on these, it will not create sales.

You need to look at your numbers in terms of sales. Stop looking at all of these other metrics all the time.

The difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business is one thing: one metric revenue. That's it. That's all that matters. Stay focused on revenue number one, and then everything else is secondary.

When you start focusing on what's going to bring in more sales, it will help you prioritise your tasks.

LET’S QUICKLY RECAP

The key takeaway from this is that if you think there is a right or wrong way to do things, it is only going to make you slower and more confused.

Instead, you need to create a plan which prioritises high-impact, money-making activities and then continuously line your thoughts up and sell yourself on why you love that plan.

You’ve got this boss!