Introducing: The Priority Grid
When life is stressful, it’s hard to see what needs tackling first. As a business owner, it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees so we have written a series of blogs that should help get you and your business back on track.
The ‘To Do’ list becomes never-ending and where previously, it felt manageable, now you feel weighed down and overwhelmed. This accumulation of chronic stress simply compounds the problem and won’t go away without intervention.
One great tool is (again thinking about your business functionally, not personally) to create what we call a priority grid:
Your never-ending to do list can then be thought about in these terms. When you have a spare few minutes, tick off some of the unimportant and not urgent things, when you have a little more time focus on the important but not urgent items.
You never block time out of your diary to deal with anything that is neither important nor urgent and the idea is to get a handle on your own time to start to ensure nothing ever lands in the ‘important and urgent box’!
Be selfish with your time as a business owner. Really selfish. We have seen instances where an analysis of sales team members revealed that 14% of their time was spent waiting in reception and engaged in small talk.
Think about involving Rowdens
Talk to us about helping you work out what needs to be done now. We can help you identify those tasks that are critical and right now, have the most significant effect upon your business. You will be alleviating the issues that eat away at your time repeatedly and hopefully this approach will give you more time to spend away from the business.
We can help you discover online tools that offer time management solutions and increase both efficiency and productivity. One headache for a small business owner is payroll and logging into the bank to pay your employees can be very time consuming. Modulr is a client payment service we are now using that integrates with our BrightPay payroll software and is a real game changer (find out more on our website, ‘Modulr integration with BrightPay’).
In summary:
Determine which tasks are critical and focus on those that have the most significant impact on your business (this can be as simple as ‘what needs to be done today, what should be done today and what can be done sometime’)
Use software solutions that help you prioritise tasks based on urgency and importance.