If you are being honest with yourself, do you know how to prioritize? We are all really good at starting projects but we seldom finish them. Most likely because we prioritized the wrong things. One common thing that we all tend to do is that we do the fun things first and forgets about the hard things. This is why many of us (including me) have so many ongoing projects. The fun stuff is fun to do and the hard stuff, not so much. This is exactly why you need to learn how to prioritize, so your projects actually gets done.
To give you a feel for how it looks like when you have to much going on. I will share my list of ongoing projects.
- Finish my daily driver car
- Start another massive car project
- Work on my business
- Work on my other business
- Change my current job
- Get a girlfriend
- Start meditating on a daily basis
- Go to the gym
- Read more books
As you can see, there is a lot going on and if I did not know how to prioritize I would go insane. The amount of work some of these points take is crazy and trying to do them all at the same time does not work, trust me. The only thing I ended up with was nose bleed, inability to sleep and an unfocused mind.
How to prioritize like a boss
You probably have a list like mine in your head or on paper. If it’s on paper then good, you are already one step ahead of me. To learn how to prioritize like a boss you need to do these 4 things.
#1 – Write it down
Congratulation to all of you who have your goals written down, you guys can skip to #2. Now for the rest of us we need to start writing. I talk a lot about writing things down I know. But it’s for a good cause, writing things down clears the mind and make things official. If it’s on a paper, it’s official. Make sure that you capture every little idea you have in your mind. At this point you can also remove the ideas that you know that you never will prioritize. Only put things on this list that you want to accomplish. Don’t waste your time on things you will never do, just throw those ideas in the trash right away.
#2 – Structure
Now you need to make something out of that list. Make a timeline and put your ideas on it. Be realistic, you can’t do everything at the same time even if you wanted to. Set both a start and finish date, so you actually will do something. Take a hard look at your list and decide what requires a lot of work and what does not. This way you can structure your list, you will know what you can and can’t do at the same time. And if you don’t know if you can do both pie baking and knife throwing at the same time, try. It’s okay if it did not work out, just open your timeline and move one or the other to after the first one is done.
#3 – Know what is important
You have probably heard about the Pareto principle. It States that 20% of the activity will account for 80% of the results. Why is this important? The one thing we don’t want is to prioritize the wrong things. Only focus on the 20% that will benefit you and your business the most. If you spend 1 month on designing a logo instead of opening you bakery, you will not have any customers – bad for business. Do it the other way around, make sure that the customers have somewhere to come to and have a simple logo for now. Once business is flowing you can buy some crayons and design a cool logo.
#4 – A goal
I cant stress enough how important having a goal is. If you start working a task without goal, what are the chances that you will finish it. Close to 0 if you ask me. Set a realistic goal for yourself, but don’t be to gentle either. What you want is a goal that is just hard enough that you will work for it. Lets say that you love horse riding but you are a bit over weight for jumping obstacles. Don’t set the goal to “I want to loose 50Kg”, that is kind of empty, undefined and easy to break. It should be something more like “I need to loose 50Kg, so I finally can try jumping obstacles”. Now you have something to work for that will motivate you.
Always remember to celebrate a victory. When you reach one of your goals no matter how small, celebrate it. Let yourself know that you finished something.
Think treasure map
When you are taking on a new project, you will need a initial plan. I say initial, because 98,76% of the time it will change the deeper in the project you get. If you are familiar to pirate history. One of the most used things after rum and badly written sailing songs are treasure maps. This is why you need to bring up your inner pirate and draw a treasure map of your project.
This map will work as a guideline for how you will reach the X. Instead of palm trees and sea water you will use terms that will fit your project. On the way you will also draw in some strategic milestones. By doing this you don’t end up with a mountain of messy ideas and things to do. You will know exactly what the next step is and therefore also how to prioritize it.
Milestones are also an important part of the process and you need them. if you were to just draw a straight line from start to finish on a major project, you would probably fail on executing it. This is because there is a mountain of things to do and no structure to deal with everything. It will be overwhelming. This is exactly why you need to stop for a moment at each milestone and celebrate. You are one step closer to your goal. For example: if you have set up our first web shop and make your first sale after 3 months of hard work. You should celebrate, it does not matter if you only sold something for .01$. You did good and reached a goal, celebrate it and let it motivate you to do even more.
Use it to get s**t done
A good way to use prioritization is when you want to get something done. Instead of saying “I’ll do it later” say ” I don’t prioritize it”. Did you feel it? The last one has more punch. Why? Because when you are telling yourself to postpone something, you are literally telling yourself that it is okay not to finish. This is unless the thing you’ve just postpone has a finish date. But it’s still not a good idea to stress finish a project the night before. However when you tell yourself that you don’t prioritize it, it hurts more. Because now you have told yourself that you really don’t care about it later either.
Lets use these different statements in something useful like eating healthier. Which one sounds like you really don’t care. “I want to eat healthier, but I’ll do it later” or I want to eat healthier, but I don’t prioritize my health”. If you’d ask me, the last one sounds worse. The last one does really sounds like you don’t give a fuck about your health at all. It sound like you much rather eat a pizza then a sallad.
I think you see where I’m going with this. If you want to start something new: a project, business, start going to the gym or asking that guy out for coffee. Stop using the phrase “I’ll do it later”, don’t let yourself postpone things to the end of time. Star using the “I don’t prioritize this” to motivate yourself to take action. Since you are reading this you are already an action taker. But I think there are things you are endlessly postponing. I know that I do it sometimes. There are things in my life that I would need to address right now. but I keep postponing them. It’s human nature to do so and we are doing this because we might be scared of dealing with it.
When you know what you are prioritizing in life you can rule out the unimportant stuff. Let yourself focus on what’s important. When you truly become a boss of prioritizing your life will become so much easier. You know what to do and when to do it. You even hava a solution for when you run into problems. No need to worry when you already know what to do. I think I’ll end this with saying that this skill will make you efficient in life.
