Setting Priorities
Holiday season is in full swing for most makers, some of y’all I know get started in the Summer! When times get busy and you’re doing a million things, it can feel chaotic. When you feel that chaos creeping in, I encourage you to think about your priorities and make sure they really are what you should be working on to get the most out of your time.
Write To-Do’s Down
First step, and it’s an important one is write down everything you need to do down. I suggest you do it on an organization tool, like Trello, but if all you have is a piece of paper that works too. By writing everything down you can see your full list — maybe it’s as long as you thought or maybe you’ll be surprised how short and manageable it is. When we only keep things in our heads it can feel overwhelming and putting it on paper can relieve that pressure.
Evaluate Your To-Do List
Now that you have everything written down, look at each item and evaluate the following:
How much time will this task take me? Will this take me all day? A few hours / minutes?
What is the additional cost to complete this task? Do I need to spend money? Hire someone? What are the resources?
When this task is complete, what impact will it provide for my business? Will this convert to customer sales, or save me time?
What’s the risk of this not getting done? Will you loose potential profit?
The ideal task is one that doesn’t take much time, is low cost, but does reduce risk or provide positive impact, especially if it’s in the form of sales. However you may have something that will take a lot of time and effort, for example redesigning your website, but you know the impact will be great because it will bring in more customers and sales.
Assign Priority Order
Now you have your to-do’s written down and have info on the importance of each of them. It’s time to set a priority order and dates to knock them out. Think of the following when setting an order.
Use the answers to the questions above and order items from top to low priority.
Start with the hard tasks at the beginning of your day when your energy level is the highest.
Be realistic with yourself, what can you actually get done in a day, week, etc.
Get to Work
Alright, we have our tasks and their order, now it’s time to work! Remember these three things when tackling the tasks.
Schedule the tasks for each day/week. That way when you start each day you know exactly what to work on and don’t have to spend that time planning.
Be flexible. Maybe you had an item on your list for today, but you’ve hit a block. Be kind to yourself and move it if that’s what’s best for you. When you pick it back up you can come back fresh and ready to tackle it.
Avoid multi-tasking. By not multi-tasking you will finish your task much quicker.
As we enter the holiday season, I see all your makers staying up late finishing products, hauling products across towns to markets, all while trying to grow your business. Remember 1) you got this and 2) set priorities to make it easier on yourself.
