You have a to do list that you want to achieve. Now what? The list looks daunting, and you struggle to understand where to start. This genuine and significant challenge polarises many of us and prevents us from achieving what we need to achieve. We procrastinate and get stuck.
We also understand that succeeding with goals means that you need to do tasks that can help achieve your goal now, rather than putting them off until tomorrow. This is what successful people do – they prioritise their tasks to ensure that the most critical tasks are completed each day, even if they are challenging and not motivating for you to achieve.
How do we decide on which tasks we need to focus on first? What is the priority of the tasks? What comes first?
To understand this in more detail, we need to re-visit your purpose and motivation. Starting with the most extended period in the questions below, map out the answers to the following questions.
- What do you want to achieve by the end of this year, quarter, month, week or day?
- What do you need to achieve by the end of this year, quarter, month, week or day?
By asking what you want and need, we can start understanding what is achievable for you versus potentially a wish list.
Having understood the ‘what’ to do, we can now move into the ‘how’ to do.
For example,
if your need to achieve a %age increase in revenue in your business, there are certain activities that you need to undertake to achieve that %age increase. It could be that you need to get to more networking events or increase your social media activity.
We need to get more granular
This alone is not enough. We need to get more granular.
For example,
- What type of networking events do you need to go to is defined by the type of people that go to the networking events. So which events will be more advantageous for you to meet your ideal clients.
- Considering social media, if we need 100 new contacts to drive one sale, what is it about that one person/business you can then target more accurately. What is it about them that wants your services or provisions more?
With a tiny bit of analysis, we can get more targeted. We can understand what impact we have. But this may fall out of our comfort zone and need us to expend energy to do this activity.
In his book “Eat that Frog”, Brian Tracy suggests that you do the task that you don’t want to do first – you eat that frog first before it eats you. In this context, a’ frog’ is considered the most challenging and most important thing you are most likely to leave until the last minute because you do not want to do it.
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
Mark Twain
The journey we have gone on through this short article should become embedded in your approach. You can use systems or apps to help you keep track of your priorities or keep the systems on paper through to-do lists.
When deciding which tasks should get priority, you can typically classify them as urgent, high, normal, or low priority. It is essential to take the time to define each of these categories so you know what type of task should go in each category.
Once you know that you have tasks that need to be done that day, following a priority list that you have created using the above thinking can help you quickly put them in the correct order. Doing this can keep you focused throughout the day, so you can easily accomplish the things that need to be taken care of.
