Are you prioritizing the WRONG things? If you’re reading this, you’ve decided that my advice is worth spending a couple of minutes reading. If that’s true, then I’m accomplishing my goal, which is to arm you with simple tips you can start using immediately to improve your growing business. Effective time management is a skill all business owners struggle with.
That being said, if you’re reading this in lieu of meeting an upcoming deadline, your priorities might be a little out of whack…
If you’re not sure whether you should be reading this email right now, let me introduce you to the Eisenhower matrix, a simple tool to help you better prioritize your to-do list.
Here’s how it works:
Make a list of all of the tasks you need to complete today, this week, and this month. From there, you’ll separate them into four main categories:
- Urgent & Important tasks
- These are projects which need to be completed immediately. They are due today or maybe even yesterday. Not completing these tasks will surely have a negative impact on your business.
- Not Urgent & Important tasks
- These are projects which should be scheduled on your calendar for a future date. These are tasks that are important to complete, but that don’t need to be done today or tomorrow, or maybe even this week.
- Urgent & Unimportant tasks
- These are projects which can (and should be) delegated to someone else. What tasks could someone else complete for you with detailed instructions from you? What tasks do you do over and over because they are necessary, but would save you time if you delegated them to someone else?
- Not Urgent & Unimportant tasks
- These are projects which don’t have a deadline and aren’t going to help you reach your goals. These tasks should be removed from your list of things to do, so you aren’t distracted or overwhelmed by them. These are often things that you think you need to do or have been wanting to do but simply haven’t made time for.
Of course, deciding what category each of your tasks fall into is not always going to be easy. However, once you learn to organize your tasks in this way, you may find you are spending far less time doing unimportant things, which tend to take up a lot of our precious time. Don’t let indecisiveness keep you from mastering effective time management skills.
As Mark Twain said, “To change your life, you need to change your priorities.”
Let me know how your prioritizing goes this week.
