BRX Pro Tip: 4 Ways to Prioritize
Stone Payton: Welcome back to Business RadioX Pro Tips. Stone Payton and Lee Kantor here with you. Lee, I think maybe we created this Pro Tip for my benefit because it’s a growth area for me, but what are some ways to really get our arms around this business of prioritizing?
Lee Kantor: A lot of people struggle with this, and here’s some techniques that you can use that help you find the one that works for you. But this is a great kind of portfolio of ideas when it comes to prioritizing.
Lee Kantor: The first thing you have to do is kind of just do a brain dump where you just list all the the stuff you have to do and all those things that are kind of weighing on you and just get them all down on paper so you can see them all.
Lee Kantor: And then, here’s four different types of strategies to prioritize. The first one is the eat the frog. And the thinking behind that is you do the hardest thing first, what’s the thing that’s going to have the most impact, the biggest bang for the buck. Just work on that and make sure that gets done each day. The second strategy is the ABC method, where you take all the tasks and then you kind of in your head, you just go, “Okay. What are all the A, B and C tasks? Which are the most important, second most important, and third most important?” And then, just work on the A’s, and then you go through that and then the B’s and the C’s.
Lee Kantor: The third strategy is the Eisenhower or the Eisenhower Matrix, or the Stephen Covey kind of matrix, where you’re putting tasks in one of four quadrants. You make a box, put four boxes within that one box, and then you delineate between important and urgent. And that’s another great way to kind of sort through your list of things you have to do and decide which are the most important.
Lee Kantor: And then, the last thing – one of my favorites – is called time boxing. And this is you take all those tasks and you just pop them right into your calendar and you just put them directly into the calendar, just put a time. And then, when you have a calendar and I know I lean heavily on mine, I look at my calendar every day and I know I do certain things at certain times. So, when the thing is in your calendar, you’re more likely to do it. So, you just take your task and just put them in the calendar, put scheduled time for them, and then knock them out the time you’ve scheduled.
