Wake up early, brain already churning. Muse over new ideas over breakfast. Arrive before anyone, flip on the lights, your computer, the coffee. Check your e-mail, new problems – no surprise there. Task your team. Do some things yourself. Do a LOT of things yourself. Respond to e-mails. Show someone how to fix a problem. Work through lunch, no biggie. A customer calls with questions. De-brief the team. Check on due dates. Get home later than you expected, again. Dinner. Finish up what you couldn’t get to during the day. Can’t quite get it all done. Go to bed later than you intended, exhausted. Lay awake thinking about tomorrow’s problems. Drift off… Repeat.
Sound familiar? It’s a hard life. But if you love what you do as much as we do, you’d choose it every time. It’s a great life!
Make Prioritizing Your Top Priority
Still, great as the life may be, you’ve got to make traction. To do that, you need these kinds of reminders. You need to be refocused regularly. You need to make prioritizing and planning your top priorities. With priorities, you’ll plan cleaner. With a plan, you’ll get more done. Way more done.
The Compound Interest of Prioritizing
Every day that you prioritize and plan, you’re compounding interest. The more important things you get done each day, the more you can accomplish each week. Which then multiplies how far you get this month. And that will compound for this year. The best result of prioritizing properly each day is not the checked boxes and that satisfied feeling. No the greatest result is that focus and accomplishment compounded year-over-year which massively helps you achieve success in the long run.
Focus on what is Important. Understand that just because something is Urgent doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Important. For more on that we recommend you read any one of a number of books by Steven Covey.
What Should Your Priorities Be
- Setup Your To-Do List – Sit down and writing a phyiscal To-Do list for the day. A manageable, accomplishable, reasonable set of goals for the day, from most important and urgent to least important, but still urgent. If something is neither important nor urgent, then you should be finding a way to eliminate it or delegate it.
- Happy, Paying Customers – A good reputation takes time. A bad reputation will ruin your business overnight. Just ask any number of NFL players who made poor life decisions. Be honest, be helpful, and be incredible. Deliver on your promises and leave a trail of customers who sing your praises.
- Hot Leads – The first thing you do every day should be to answer questions or turn around estimates for qualified, interested leads.
- Crockpot Marketing – Content based, long-term strategic marketing requires that you work every single day on producing today’s piece of the big picture. (If you don’t have the big picture outlined yet then start with that.) You have got to make this a priority now. Every Day.
- New Client Kickoff – Get the ball rolling so your team can get to work. Outline the project, authorize the orders, approve the estimates – whatever your role is in getting the ‘real work’ started. Get your team up and running.
- Communication – If you can’t answer a question right away, send them an e-mail saying you got their message and your team is on it. You’ll get back to them as soon as you have an answer and here’s the timeframe for that response.
- The “Real” Work – Producing your widget. All the stuff everyone thinks you do all day.
- Wrap Up – If your day ends at 6 then probably at 5:30 you should shut down what you’re doing. Final check e-mail. (In fact, we recommend checking your e-mail only twice a day. There are still telephones if it’s a true emergency…) Review your accomplishments from today. Adjust tomorrow’s goals.
- Go Home – Seriously. It’s hard to do some days, but your life needs a balance. If you burn ’til you burn out, your business is going to suffer a serious setback. You need to always be prioritizing your ability to meet the future needs of your employees and your customers. A maintainable pace is an important part of that.
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