December 11, 2009

When you’re running a small business, there are always a million things to do – clients to please, bills to pay, contracts to negotiate, employees to manage, and so on. And those are just the day-to-day ongoing tasks, which don’t even include the big-picture projects you need to complete (e.g. a marketing initiative, a major partnership, a new feature release) to really take your business to the next level. So how do you best prioritize to make sure you’re not just keeping afloat, but also moving your business forward?

Based on our ongoing conversations with particularly productive creative and business leaders, we’ve distilled down a few quick tips on how to prioritize effectively:

1. Keep two lists. Generally, most of us organize our to-dos – or, “actions steps” as we call them at Behance – as if they were all of equal importance. But there are two very distinct types of action steps we deal with: a constant stream of “urgent” items (e.g. assuaging an angry client) that maintain the status quo, as well as big picture “important” items (e.g. doing R&D on a new product) that push your business forward.

Keeping one list of “urgent” action steps, and another with “important” action steps empowers you to make smart decisions about how much time you’re allotting to both maintaining and growing your business. Of course, the problem is that “urgent” things that have to be done today will always trump the “important” things that should be done for tomorrow, which brings us to the next point…

2. Proactively carve out blocks of time to tend to your “important” list. Don’t worry about the urgent list – it will always take care of itself. Instead, block out time daily or weekly to make sure you’re moving through the action steps on your important list. Most people find that setting aside a few hours in the morning before they check their email to be the most effective technique. During this time period, don’t answer the phone, don’t check your email, and don’t surf the Internet for recreation – these are all things that can quickly pull you off course and back into your urgent list.

4. Make sure you prioritize action steps for things that only you can do. It can be difficult to delegate certain tasks to someone else, whether it’s handling sensitive information or checking up on key business analytics. At the same time, if you’re running the ship, you want to be focused on doing the things that will move your business forward. It’s worthwhile to ask yourself, “Is this something only I can do?” on a regular basis. If certain tasks can be delegated, do so immediately.

5. Worry only about problems that you can influence. Occasionally, we prioritize action steps for which there is really no real action to be taken. Usually the items that fall into this category are things that we’re worried about, but can’t really change. These can be obsessive things we do that achieve nothing (such as checking on your Twitter followers everyday), or anxiety-inducing stuff that you can’t do anything about (such as a competitor receiving a favorable write-up in a major publication). We expend valuable energy on things that don’t “move the needle” on our businesses all the time. A best practice – and one that requires a lot of willpower! – is to prioritize only those actions that will cause productive change.

***This post by J.K. Glei is based on research by the Behance team. Behance runs the Behance Creative Network, the 99% productivity think thank, the Action Method project management application, and the Creative Jobs List.

Join the conversation ( 2 )

• MELANIE STRICK 2 years 1 months and 29 days ago

  

  Balancing my to-do's was one of the hardest to learn. I quickly learned the value of getting everything off my plate that I don't need to do myself! I have a technique of taking my "should be doing" list and evaluating whether I can just "do it", "delegate it", or "delete it" -- mostly cause it's never going to happen anyway!
  
  Thanks for a great post! Melanie

• Jill Fehrenbacher 2 years 1 months and 30 days ago

  

  This is a really helpful article! I especially like the idea of designating certain days for certain activities. Managing my business involves a constant flow of tasks, and frankly, all of them seem incredibly urgent. I just might give this suggestion a try next week. Thanks for the tips!