Prioritizing Your Time Should Be Your First Priority

Are you well-known for always being fashionably late?

Do you feel like tasks drag on for days after a deadline?

Have your days started to blend because you’re working on the same things over and over but never really getting anything done?

Then you might have a time management issue, and there’s no day planner available that can fix the problem until you learn how to prioritize your time properly. 

As a business owner, you must be able to control your own time by prioritizing your time. Without that skill, you’ll feel your work-life balance slip away, eventually leading to a bad case of burnout. 

It’s also a poor example for your employees, who rely on you to set the tone of the work environment, including how loose or rigid deadlines are. If you’re always late, it’s hardly surprising that it becomes a part of the business culture, which is bad news for your clients or customers. 

So, how can you go about prioritizing your time in a meaningful and purposeful way? Let’s look at three methods: 

Eisenhower Matrix

Ideal for: business owners who struggle to delegate, those who work to find time for hobbies, directionless list makers

Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” From that sprang forth the Eisenhower Matrix, a prioritization strategy that utilizes quartiles to split tasks by their urgency and importance. 

These four boxes create four categories of tasks:

1. The “Do” box: Urgent and important jobs with deadlines that matter to you or your business. 
2. The “Schedule” box: Important but non-urgent tasks that should focus on long-term goals
3. The “Delegate” box: Urgent but unimportant tasks that need to be done but don’t necessarily need to be done by you
4. The “Delete” box: Unimportant, non-urgent functions that don’t add anything to your life or the lives of those around you

Once all of your to-dos are sorted, you can focus on your “Do” box first, getting the most stressful burdens off your plate. The “Schedule” box comes next, creating time in your day to work towards big picture plans. 

Everything else from there just falls off your list, creating much less pressure and more time for the essential things that are valuable and meaningful. 

Eat the Frog

Ideal for: procrastinators, hard workers who never get anything done, morning people

Eat the Frog is a simple method for prioritizing your time that pushes you to complete one high-impact task at the very beginning of your day, especially if it’s one you feel very unmotivated to do. 

It’s a great strategy because it starts the day off with a win, which is something a business owner with time management deficits doesn’t get to feel as often as they should.

Like the Eisenhower Matrix, this method also stems from a quote!

Mark Twain wisely states, “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.”

You can spot your “frog” using the Eisenhower Matrix as mentioned above Matrix, honing in on the task you don’t necessarily want to do but need to do. 

Think about upcoming deadlines, responding to an angry email, or filing your taxes. Those kinds of tasks have a huge, important place on your to-do list, but they’re typically things we avoid until they absolutely have to be done. 

Ivy Lee

Ideal for: People who can’t go to bed until everything is done, business owners who bring their work home, those who struggle with decision-making 

It might be more than 100 years old, but the Ivy Lee method is still one of the most potent prioritization strategies to keep in your time management toolbox. 

Before you head to bed at night, jot down no more than six tasks you want to complete the next day in order of importance. Then, when you wake up in the morning, there’s no hemming and hawing over what needs to be done first. You can jump right in and get started!

By writing things down at night, you have the opportunity to clear your mind of all the things you “should have done” today, which in turn helps you sleep a little easier knowing that you have a clear, prioritized plan of how to proceed tomorrow. 

It also helps impulsive decision-makers give themselves limits. If you already know what needs to be done and in what order, you’re less likely to suddenly work on other, less critical tasks that push back your actual priorities. 

Need Help Prioritizing Your Time?

As a business owner, you are the foundation of your business. You set the tone and enforce the standards. Holding yourself to those standards is of the utmost importance for the reputation and well-being of your company. 

It’s also understandable how your days can get bogged down when your to-do list feels neverending. Soon, you’re saddled with the extra pressure of deciding whether to head off the new tasks before they get trapped in the endless to-do list or try tackling the old tasks that continue to circulate day after day. 

That’s what makes business coaching such a valuable asset to the “productively unproductive” business owner. Lori Moen can walk you through strategies for time management and prioritization that will make a real impact today and set you up for continued success tomorrow. Let’s connect and work together towards a solution that will help you be more efficient and effective as a business owner!