How To Prioritize What To Do (When EVERYTHING Is Important)

If every outside request is a five alarm fire, it's your house that's going to go up in flames. If you have a crazy long list of things to do and it all feels important, I'm going to show you my way for prioritizing so that you can efficiently get everything done. This is my focus flow framework for prioritizing when everything feels important. In other words, time management for busy people. Before I show you my framework, I want to talk about one that I absolutely love, but it can be challenging for some people. It doesn't always help them to see the vision if they don't know how to classify the tasks on the list. What I'm talking about first is the Eisenhower matrix. You may know this one pretty well. You've got four quadrants here. On this side, we have important and not important. Here we have urgent and not urgent. It's pretty cut and dry and actually quite useful most of the time. You see, we have quadrants one, two, three, and four. In quadrant one, you need to do these things. In quadrant two, you need to do these next because it's too easy to pay too much attention to things that are urgent but not necessarily important. That's why we go to quadrant two first. Then you go to quadrant three. These items we need to delegate. Things that are not urgent and not important would get deleted. We've talked about this in another video. The problem with this is it can be really easy to tell yourself a story about what is urgent and how urgent and what's the scale of urgent and what's important and who's it important to and how important is it. Sometimes you end up having things in certain quadrants that don't always make sense for you. That's why I like my focus flow framework. If this is not helping, this might be able to crack the code for you. If the Eisenhower matrix isn't quite getting you to that level of productivity that you want to see, it might be because of that lack of clarity of some of your tasks. Here is my focus flow framework. We're actually going to create six boxes. Do two lines here and then just break them up. What we need to know is what to do now, what to do next, and what to do later. The first thing we know we need to do, if you're sitting there right now and you're like, what do I do? How do I prioritize? Get a hold of yourself, woman. Let's figure it out. We first have to focus on what's critical and time sensitive. This section you're probably pretty well versed in. It's stuff that's really important and has to get done in the next 24 hours. It's likely that there's an immediate negative impact if you try to delay it. If someone gets hurt and has to go to the hospital, that's what we're talking about here in critical. If it's 545 and you need to pick your kid up by six, otherwise they're going to be worried about your parenting. This is critical. This section is something we're very versed in because we probably pay a lot of attention to it when emergencies pop up throughout the day. It's also possible that things end up in this section that should not be there, which is why we need to have it clearly defined. Immediate negative impact has to happen in the next 24 hours. Emergency. Also, there is another section of things you need to do right now. We hopefully don't have back-breaking critical things happening all the time, but they do need to be prioritized above other items that would fall under important and urgent. This is likely to be a list of things that need to happen this week. You've got a little bit more breathing room. The sooner you get it done, the better, the more productive, the more efficient you are, but you are not going to have an immediate negative impact if you don't get it done. Having this separation and seeing it is going to be very useful for you. What's going to happen in the next 24 hours versus what's going to happen in the next five to seven days does need to be classified a little differently. The keyword is important in these because while they may feel urgent, if they have an impact on the greater vision of your life, they are also important, which is why they get classified above what happens here. Under next, we first need important, but not urgent. Noticing what's time sensitive and getting it done is important, but most important because we need to find the time and space for the things that are not as time critical, but could still make a massive difference in your vision and quality of life. Recognizing what are some things that I've always wanted to do? What's a big project I want to get done? What's something that could happen in the next year, the next six months? Something that's really big, that's important, but it's not urgent. Nobody's holding your feet to the fire, or at least if they are, it's very fluid and you're the one that's going to have to figure it out. I like to put writing a book in this category. You need to write the book. The book has to get done at some point, but you have to make the time for it in the immediacy so that over time it gets done. That's what makes it important, but not urgent. What you also need to do next is maintenance. I like maintenance to be separate from important and not urgent because if you see things that you have to do on the regular, like every day or once a week, on the same list of things that are important but not urgent, they will very likely upgrade themselves to happen before those big projects that can truly move the needle. We're going to get to them next, but not after what we address is important. Then finally, I'm getting creative here in the later category. I want you to be thinking much more tangibly about stuff that could happen that you probably don't make the time for, or maybe you do, but it's haphazard, but could happen later if approached in the right way. For here, I'm going to put growth and luxuries. I like the word luxuries because it's another word for self-care. How often are you taking care of yourself? Are there things you can do to take care of yourself, to make yourself feel more like you, to do the things that really fill your cup that make all of this so much easier? It may look like it's not important because it's in the later category, but I'm going to show you why it works that way. First, let's just go through some examples. Critical would be pick up at five. Got to go pick up the kids. Another thing that's critical for me is to film this video. I am on a deadline and it literally is in the way of absolutely everything else. I've turned my phone off. I'm behind on making this video, so film. It's got to be moved up to critical because now I'm holding up my entire team who's waiting for this video right now. The meta level of my list. It's ridiculous. By the way, we have a goal to hit 500,000 subscribers on this channel, so if you haven't done it already, click subscribe. Also critical is that I need to run payroll because if I don't do that, my team doesn't get paid, and that has significant negative consequences. Now, important and urgent includes one of the sales meetings that I'm going to be having this week and also posting Amy TV on YouTube. These things have deadlines. These have rough days and times that they will happen, but as long as they happen during a stretch of this week, we're all good. They don't belong in critical. They belong in important and urgent. I'm going to get to them as soon as possible, but not before I take care of my most important things today. If you're not sure what to put in important and not urgent, it's likely a master plan to something big. If you want help with that, come over to my Instagram and send me the DM action, and I'll give you a free gift. It's my extraordinary action framework that'll help you to unpack what the steps will be to making your big dream happen. Now, on the list of important but not urgent, like I said, writing pages of my next book. That is not something somebody's asking me for every day. No one is knocking on my door asking me how I'm doing on progress on the book, but I know it's important. I want it to get done at some point. It is going to be something I'm held accountable to at a designated point in time in the next six to 12 months. So if I'm not working on it in the meantime, not good. I also need to plan my coaching training and my leadership training for my team. For me, maintenance looks like a lot of social media. I post two Instagram reels every day. So as long as I try to stick to that to the best of my ability, that is something that I maintenance. Another maintenance is just making sure that I get the press that I want. So I like to do regular podcast interviews, making sure that I do those interviews and get them scheduled as something that we basically maintenance within the business. Are there enough of them on the calendar? Am I setting aside the time? Have we booked them? That is a maintenance task. Now for growth, I have an event that I want to go to in Nashville, so I need to book my Nashville trip and I also need to refresh my networking list, go through my list of contacts and try to figure out who I haven't touched base with in a while so that I can say hello and make sure that I keep those relationships fresh. Now under luxuries, I also need to book a family trip. I'm also planning a founder dinner and I really want to book a spa day because I have a gift certificate and I really want to use it. So you have some examples here. They're going to be different for everyone. What does it mean to have to do something critically very soon? What is something that's very important, very urgent, but not going to hurt anyone if it doesn't happen? What are the important things that are not urgent but needle moving in your life or work? What do you maintenance on a regular basis and what are some ways that you can grow and take time for yourself? Have those luxuries in your life. These categories do a better job of prioritizing for me because now I know what to do now, next, and later. And how I approach this is I look at this as do, I look at this as block, and I look at this as delegate. Now let's start with delegate. A lot of you are probably thinking, I don't have anyone to delegate to. First of all, we all have to get very good at asking for help. Are there people in your life who you can ask for help, like your significant other, your roommate, your family, anyone who can help you to move these things along? For me, it's my assistant. I like to ask my administrative assistant to help me. That is who I delegate to or I delegate to people in my family, depending on what the task is. But if you find yourself in a situation where you are not delegating yet, I still want you to be thinking like this is a delegation category because that is how you get better at getting your time back. When you see that there are things that maybe you shouldn't be doing, but you still have to do, put them somewhere where you can eventually get them to a point where you're not doing them. In the meantime, if you're not delegating, you can do weekly assessment. And so with that, I don't pay attention to these every single day and I'm not worried about them. But when I do my weekly review, which I've made a video about, you should check it out. Then I'm going to go through the list of these things and try to get updated or spend a little bit of time on them that I wouldn't have been able to get back otherwise. Can I move the needle on this stuff? Can I ask for help? Can I do some research? I'm going to do this during my weekly assessment so that there is time allocated to it. Not a ton of time, but enough for me to get an update for myself on the project in general. The now category and do pretty self-explanatory. You're probably like, I don't even want to finish doing this. I need to just start doing the stuff in the do column. No, no. Do the whole thing first and then do the critical, do the urgent and important. But my favorite column is block. This is where you calendar block your life. What are the things that are important, but not urgent that if you made the appointment on the calendar for yourself, you'd be more likely to show up. Just like you would go meet someone for coffee because you made the appointment. You're going to go because they're going to be there. Go to the appointment where your book is waiting for you to write it. Go to the appointment where you're going to work out at the gym. Go to the appointment where you spend five minutes posting your Instagram reel, block the time on the calendar. So, you know, you've made that moment a priority in a way that's more sustainable and becomes a habit in your life. So I block out my interviews on my calendar. I checked to see, did we hit the quota of one or two interviews this week? Why didn't we let's make sure we're maintenancing that better. Am I blocking time to post my reel in the morning? I'm post another reel in the evening. Did I block that time? How much time have I blocked to write the book? Mark it out. Once you fill space with these items, it takes up some room. And then you have this other stuff happening. That's super critical, super important. And you're going to schedule those as well. There, they might be one-offs. They might also be something that's a regular habit for you, but you're going to schedule these in as well. I just like to defend a good amount of my calendar for this stuff that often will fall to the wayside, but makes a huge difference. By blocking it out, you're more likely to respect that time on your calendar. And when the critical and urgent and important stuff comes up, it fits in more naturally. So you need some white space so that this stuff will get an opportunity to have time in your life so that this stuff doesn't get canceled because it's already there. And then you figure this stuff out as you have the bandwidth. That's my focus flow framework to help you prioritize when it feels everything is important. If you want to learn how to stay focused on long-term goals every single day, check out the link below and I'll see you there.