🧙 The magic prioritisation trick

Every one of you who runs a business would benefit from taking 20 minutes to complete this exercise today. I did recently and it really helped.

As entrepreneurs, we have 1001 things we could be doing. But there is a difference between can do vs should do. Identifying and working on the things that move the needle is the single biggest requirement for success as a business person.

Unfortunately, people are bad at distinguishing between urgent vs important.

• Urgent = Catastrophic consequences if this doesn’t get completed in the shortest time possible (this is my preferred definition so I don’t default into optimising for combatting urgency). I often put a monetary or social value on what defines “catastrophic consequences”. Very little is truly urgent.

  
  

  • A softer definition is that something is urgent if the value of the work degrades significantly over time. All task usefulness degrades, but some tasks degrade quicker than others. The longer you leave a task, the less valuable it becomes.

    
    

• Important = Is likely to make a significant improvement to your life or business. It helps to define “significant” (e.g. by monetary value, time saved, etc).

  
  

Both urgent and important have “levels”. They’re aren’t binary, they exist on a continuum.

The magic prioritisation trick will help you to identify which levels of urgency and importance your tasks belong in, so you can easily see exactly what you should work on next.

It is hard to overstate how useful it is to know what tasks you should prioritise. I strongly recommend you give the exercise a go.

This piece comes from a fantastic article by The Beautiful Mess, who is well worth checking out.

This screenshot is from step 4 out of 5. Read the full article to see the final form. I’ve

done it this way to encourage you to read it, as the 5 minute read will save you

months or more in effort. Read it. It is worth it.

I like for my points across emails to link well together, so you may ask how Kondo links to the magic prioritisation trick.

Learning how to prioritise leads is a vitally important skill for early-stage entrepreneurs (typically business owners with less than $1m revenue), and I often work with entrepreneurs to define things like “places of high concentration” of leads and hierarchy of leads.

Both points in this email will help you prioritise your work and your leads so you can make more money with less work.

This point came from my newsletter Work Smart Wednesday, if you would like to read the other related points I made in that email you can find it here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-september-10 

🤔 Curious about how I help people like you?

I like to keep things simple. My offers can be boiled down to one key promise: When you work with me, you will make more money and you will work fewer hours. Sounds counterintuitive, but I’ve helped more than 270 people achieve exactly that so far. Systems work.

My offer is also a little counterintuitive, I provide unlimited 1:1 coaching support to you. Everyone asks how that is possible as they assume I will be swamped with sessions, but by offering unlimited sessions it aligns our goals:

• You (my client) want reliable support whenever you happen to need it and to achieve your goals with me

  
  

• I want you to focus on the value you get rather than the time we spend together

  
  

I get rewarded with more free time when I give good sessions that answer all your questions and actually help you achieve your goals. It is in my interests to give sessions so good that you don’t need to speak with me for a week or two because you’re already so clear on what to do and how to do it. That helps you have more time and make more progress.

If you want to explore what a great coaching session feels like, you can try one here:

🔍 Clarity Call - Get your most immediate problems immediately solved with my 1:1 help. You will know exactly what you need to do next (and how to do it!).

💡 Want more from me? Find more on my LinkedIn profile.

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