Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License

You launched your business out of a deep passion and desire to create something out of nothing.  You took your love of something creative and built it into a business, slowly but surely.  And, then after time, you began to see that it wasn’t just the creative “thing” that you were working on, but a myriad of other things: paying bills, cleaning desks, answering email, returning phonecalls, and meetings meeting meetings!  You are a juggler.  How well do you keep all the balls up in the air?

One of the greatest skills you can perfect as a small business owner is your ability to prioritize. Can you attend to the most important and most urgent responsibilities daily, or do you get swallowed up in small tasks?

Here are my 6 easy tips for prioritizing:

  1. Get it all down on paper. We all make lists… we are organized wedding pros.  But, make a huge master list – ESPECIALLY when you feel overwhelmed.
  2. Circle the items that need to happen today. These are the very urgent items that will affect your reputation (and your ability to stay in business.)  These are URGENT and IMPORTANT items.
  3. Put a star next to the items that are IMPORTANT but not URGENT.  These are items that have long-term value, but are not urgent.  You will not be ridiculed in the media if they don’t happen today.  They can be prioritized tomorrow or next week (when things slow down a bit.)
  4. Take a look at how many items you have circled – and, if feasible, some of the starred items.  Can you get those done in a reasonable amount of time today?  If so, get moving!  If not, trim it down with most urgent and most important.
  5. Take a look at the items without a circle or star.  Are any of them urgent but not important?  How important are they?  Make a call as to whether they need to happen today.   If they are a maybe – put a question mark next to them.
  6. Take a look at the items with no annotations. They are just sitting there, ready to suck your time.  Scratch them off your list.  Write them down somewhere else.  Come back to them later.  Just seeing them on your list will cause you undue stress.  Revisit them a month from now.

A sample list:

prioritizeYears ago, I read the Stephen Covey book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  In it, Covey talks about putting “first things first”.  He warns that often we get carried away with the “urgent matters” (the clients needing their things TODAY) that we don’t make time for the “important matters”.  He reminds us to keep our long-term vision at the forefront of our tasks and responsibilities and not to lose sight of this vision in our more urgent tasks.  This is a good thing to remember.  I like to keep a special “important not urgent” list separate.  I circle back to this list once a week or so and chisel away at it.  (On that list?  Updating my business plan!)

Bottom line: It doesn’t need to all happen today.  Just pare your list down to what’s manageable and go from there!