Five steps to prioritising your work

You may have the best of intentions and the outward image of a successful business and still not have a successful business. You may be working harder, longer and more intensely than anyone else in your organisation, but you may well be doing the wrong work, so says an article from E-Myth Worldwide about how to go about prioritising your work.

You’re probably the lead salesperson, the chief financial officer, general manager or field supervisor, and director of marketing. What else? Receptionist? Customer service representative? Buyer? Installer? Trainer? HR? IT?

Taking on all these roles may have been required in the beginning. But there comes a point in the life of every business where, if it is going to grow and give you what you want, it is going to outstrip your capacity to do it all yourself. In the beginning, you hope you’ll have more business than you could handle. When that becomes a reality, if you haven’t laid the groundwork, things will inevitably fall apart.

You can’t always be the salesperson and still deliver on your promises. You can’t always be the lead technician while you’re struggling to keep warm leads in the pipeline. You can’t just focus on balancing these two activities while ignoring your financial management. Even if you were able to achieve a balance between these three critical pieces, you’ve run out of time to recruit, hire and train people to cover everything else!

It’s about balance So, you need to find a balance between all the roles you have in your business. You need to find a balance that works for you. And that’s true whether you’re wearing only three hats in your business, or 30. To find that balance, to develop that self-discipline, you need to cultivate the ability to choose – to discriminate and prioritise.

But when you’re bogged down in the day-to-day activities of running a business, prioritising can be a struggle. You may wake up on Monday morning with a well-crafted list of priorities, and walk in the door to face a barrage of fresh demands for your attention.

The 5 important steps. There is a way of finding your ideal work balance:

1.  Start by tracking your time. Write down what you do every minute of your workday. Be thorough. Be accurate. Do it in ‘real time’.

2.  As you track your time, create categories for the things you do. Come up with about six or eight broad subject areas (Sales calls, Management, Training, Admin, Fulfilment, Finance, Personal, In-transit) that give you a broad picture of how your time is used.

3.  After a week or two, analyse your data. What are the numbers telling you? What percentage of your time do you spend in each category? How much of your time is devoted to maintaining the status quo – repeating routine tasks? What is the work that you do that supports the greatest long-term, strategic value? How much of your time is spent in activities that further your business goals in tangible ways?

4.  Identify one routine category – or perhaps a collection of activities – that clearly should not be yours. (By the third or fourth day of tracking your time, there is bound to be an assortment of activities that begin to embarrass you even to document!)

5.  Make a plan to free yourself of those selected tasks. Make that hand-off a priority. Pick a date for when you will have freed yourself of those functions. Commit the time now to prepare for that transition and think about how you will reapportion your time more effectively when you have rescued yourself from that work.

The mere act of doing the time logging can often change behaviour dramatically. This simple tool allows you to see the assumptions you’re making and the habits you have allowed to define your role.

For the complete article, follow this link: e-myth