How do you prioritise tasks in your business?

I share my top tips for prioritising the important work in the time you have!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, gorgeous recovering perfectionist. I'm Claire Riley and you're listening to episode number 65 of the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast. Head over to clairey.co forward slash pod forward slash 65 to grab all the key takeaways and any links from this episode. So today I'm going to be talking about the best steps that I love to take to prioritize all the things that need to get done in your business. This is the Recovering Perfectionist Podcast, and I'm your host, Claire Riley. Prioritizing your work that needs to be done in your business is one of the things that I totally geek out on, I have to completely admit here. It's something that I work on with my VIPs each and every day, and it is one of the easiest things to knock on the head really, really quickly, but it's one of the things that seems to be really, really overwhelming for 99% of people at some point in their business, usually more often than not, unfortunately. So today I'm going to jump into the steps that I think really help most people to really prioritize what needs to be done in their business right now, rather than continuing to fumble through the quagmire of all the things that need to be done. So let's get started. So the first thing that I really, really love to do is to do a massive big brain dump. And I think these are so underrated. We all often talk about, you know, sitting down and going back through all of your old plans and reflecting on what's happened and thinking about setting goals for the future and that sort of thing. And I think that's really important. But there's a really key thing that needs to happen, in my opinion, before any of those things can actually be effective, and that is to clear some mental clutter and clear some mental space for yourself. So something that I get people to do at the beginning of workshops, often at the beginning of webinars, certainly at the beginning of working together in a VIP capacity with me is just to do a brain dump because it really gets all of these things out of your head that you've been thinking about that haven't been written down yet, or that you feel like you really need to address, but you haven't given it any space to actually consider what needs to happen because it just feels like too big a job. Or you've got notebooks over here and post-its over here and things on your computer over here and all of that sort of thing, and you feel like oh, I've captured it somewhere, so I just need to go and find where I've captured it, but it's still in your head. So the first thing to do is a really big brain dump, and there's a lot of ways to do this, which I won't go into too much detail right now, but it's it's often just as effective as getting a pen and paper and just jotting down all the things that come into your head. And when you think you've got everything out, have another think and think about some more things because there will always be more to purge from your mind. So getting as much out, whether it's um it could be dictating and getting someone to transcribe that for you, it could be typing it straight into whatever um time management or organization system you use. If you use something like Asana or even iNotes or Evernote or something like that, or my favorite is really just a pen and paper, just because it feels like it's a different process to go through. So, number one is to do a massive brain dump. Once you finish the brain dump, it's really important for you to sit to stand up and walk away and go and do something completely mentally different just for a little while and then come back and you can start to sort of filter through all of that stuff. When I get people to do this in whatever sort of capacity, I'm always surprised at how different they physically look after they've done a brain dump. If you've effectively gotten everything out of your mind and you feel like you've captured 99% of the stuff that you need to capture, but you also have a system and a place when those last little fleeting things kind of come into your head to put them, there is this overwhelming change in your physical thing. Your shoulders are usually lower, your eyes are brighter, everything feels a bit lighter, and there is space, right? So I'm a really, really big fan of brain dumping. You can do this with someone, you can do this by yourself, you can do it every day, you can do it once a month. It's it's just one of those super easy, wonderful tools. So highly recommend. The second thing that I like to do once you've got that brain dump out and you can see what you have created is to then start putting them into boxes. So I have a couple of different boxes. There's one that's called write effing now, let's call it flipping now, right flipping now, things that are urgent, things that are past their due date, things that desperately need to be done. Um, and often these are also income-generating things that I'm where I'm leaving money on the table, you know, and they're often the first ones that go because we feel guilty. We haven't done all the admin and the other follow-on stuff. So we'll just wait until all of this stuff's over here done until we go and do the stuff that's actually going to keep food on our tables, right? So we we categorize the first thing is right now. What are the things that really urgently desperately need to be done? We're not even going to worry about how they're going to get done or who's going to do them or what the process is. We just know like these are things that are really, really urgent. The next is two boxes. One is like in the next little while, like the next week or two, if that feels sort of doable for you. I don't like to be too prescriptive with this because some people work two hours a week in their business, some people work 40 hours a week in their business. So whatever short term kind of means to you, that's totally cool. But it's like in the near future, like in the next little while, these things need to be done. Then there's in the next month or so, or whatever the next kind of medium term looks like for you. Um, and the last one is the toy box. Like that'll be really nice. And I saw a webinar on it once, and it seems like it was really high value. But do I really have time to do it right now? Do I really can I really be bothered? Do I really have the motivation, the skills, the tools, the team, that sort of thing to actually get this done effectively, or can it go in the toy box and we'll have a look at it in a little while? Most things go in the toy box. We get all excited about things. So you do, you've done your brain dump, you've got everything mapped out of all the things that you want to be doing, and now you've separated them into some really easy to understand boxes, like right now, soon, a little bit later, if I get to them, right? There's four different steps there. The next thing that I really love to do, and I'm I'm not going to talk about it too much. One of my very first blogs was called Frogs Are Not a Breakfast Food, because the whole idea of eating a frog first up just feels like, oh, just stay in bed a little bit longer and wait until the frog's eaten itself or someone else has cooked him up for breakfast. So wherever you sit with this, sometimes I totally get that if there's a nagging, awful, shitty task on your to-do list that needs to be done, there is merit in getting it out of the way and getting it done. But also, I'm a really big fan of nurturing myself and doing the things that make me excited about having my own business and make me happy to be sitting down and getting started for the week or for the day. So wherever you sit with that, I'm cool if you want to spend the first little part of your day doing something that you really enjoy because that feels really abundant and nurturing as well. So have a bit of a think about what are what are you going to do in your daily tasks? Is it about like, oh, I'm just going to do that thing that I hate doing and get it out of the way, or is it like I'm going to do something I really, really love first up, and then I'll sandwich like something I love with something I don't love so much with some more stuff that I love. So that overall my day has been really gorgeous. So have a think about that. The next step is to get yourself a biz bestie, whether this is a peer, um, someone who you love to work with, someone who inspires you, someone who influences you, or vice versa, it could be a coach or mentor, it could be a um a group of people who you work with in a course or something like that as well. But this is a really important um factor in terms of prioritizing your work. So I meet with my bizbesti every single Monday, and we have a few minutes of chit-chat usually, and then we have about 10 minutes each to focus on what are my priorities for the week, what am I working on, what are my projects, what do I need help with, um, anything like that. And I tell you what, once we had done that for probably around four or five weeks, I reckon this has been going on for a year or two, um, after four or five weeks, we both had a bit of a sense of what our what each of our priorities were. So that when those random curveballs came up and one of us started talking about, oh, I'm going to be working on the blah, blah, blah, or I'm going to totally re-overhaul, you know, this course or something like that. The other one was like, hang on a minute. I thought you said your priorities were X, Y, and Z. And it was always just this really great reality check with someone who understood our business enough, um, who understood my business enough and who understood me and who could kind of call me on my BS when I was starting to go off the rails a little bit, right? It's a really, really important function. And I guarantee you this will be a really big game changer and something that makes a big difference. If you don't have someone who you would call your biz bestie, that's totally cool. You probably have people who you know are roughly at a similar kind of level on their um on their business journey, whether they've um, you know, started something up and you're both in the kind of new um phases of business or you're both a bit more established and you've been doing it for a while. But someone who's kind of on a level who you can also give value to in that in that way of the accountability and the bouncing ideas off and that sort of thing is an absolute game changer when it comes to prioritizing, but also to sticking to what you said was your priorities and not getting shiny object syndrome to left, right, and center, like I always do. So that is my last tip on that one. So I hope that's been helpful and I'd love to know if you have any feedback or if there's anything else that you find difficult or challenging or frustrating when you're trying to prioritize things in your business. Otherwise, until next time, I will see you on the next episode. Bye, everyone.