Priorities, priorities… how do you set your priorities? You know, I ended up in this conversation about priorities with potential client recently. She was struggling because even though she’s been working hard for several years to learn everything about running a business and get her systems in place… she still wasn’t getting the results that she wanted.
I recognized the problem immediately… having fallen into that pit once or twice myself… and I gave her some feedback that helped her and I hope will help you. Lack of results can be traced to several possible causes (unclear target market, unclear transformation/offering, poor copywriting/communication, etc.) But, sometimes it’s because while you’re doing things for your business all the time, you’re not prioritizing the things that would bring in business.
In other words, there comes a point where just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come… you have to prioritize the traffic generating tasks. How are people discovering you? Are you booking speaking events? Writing guest blogs? Broadcasting on Periscope? Getting interviewed by Podcasters? Optimizing your Facebook ads? Running webinars? Networking with influencers?
Many Type-A, driven entrepreneurs, whom I love, will see a list like that and go bonkers trying to do them all!!! It’s not a checklist; it’s a menu. This is when priorities have to come in. So, let’s talk about some key lessons in setting priorities…
Problem-Solving Priorities
What’s the greatest problem in your business or life right now? Do you need more clients/leads/traffic? Do you have too many clients for your current systems or business model, and now you’re overwhelmed? Are you hitting a growth wall where it’s time to start figuring out how to scale, hire, and expand your work even more broadly. Is your health suffering, or do you have a family member who needs more support?
We’re all at different places, and as our work evolves and our lives shift. We may even return to the same issues repeatedly. (That certainly has happened after I sold my first company, and am working on growing my new one with a very different business model. Another couple rounds up the spiral staircase of life.)
One way to approach setting your priorities is to focus on the greatest problem you’re experiencing in your business or life, then get laser focused on solving it. Which means, that if traffic/leads/clients is your problem, as in the example above… now is not the time to focus on re-organizing your filing system. That won’t fix your traffic issues.
You may want to pick 1-2 traffic generating tactics and work on them for the upcoming season. Give them a solid 3-months of effort and see what happens. Then, you can either recommit and repeat the process again to take it further, or drop one that’s not working and try a different tactic.
What does 3-months of effort mean? A task related to your chosen tactic would appear as your Inspired Action several days a week. In other words, it would be your top priority as often as possible each day. Not just on your list to work on when you have time… but a commitment you’re making to yourself to move this specific work forward. It would become your committed priority.
Creative Growth Priorities
Sometimes it’s not about the problems, however. Sometimes what your heart needs is more creativity and fulfillment. Therefore, rather than making your top priority, Inspired Action, about solving a problem, you’ll want to prioritize a creative project.
Perhaps you’re ready to write that book you’ve been thinking about for months or years. Maybe you’re ready to launch your blog and start sharing your voice and wisdom more regularly. There might be a new program that you’ve been batting around creating for your business. Or, maybe you have been putting those soul-filling creative hobbies on the back-burner for too long, and it’s time to pull out your paints, knitting needles, scrapbooking supplies, or whatever fills that void for you and make it a priority to feed your heart and soul more consistently.
What if you were to spend 30 minutes 4 or 5 days a week getting your creativity on? Whether you’re working on projects that will someday be shared or just juicing up your own creativity to increase your joy in life. What if you were to dedicate a season to this priority? Just like in the example above, could you dedicate 3 months to a specific creative project?
I’m now days away from finishing a needlepoint project that I have literally been working on for 24 years. It was a gift from my mother on a vacation when I was 12 years old. I’ve picked it up and put it away so many times over the years. Now, I’m determined to finish it, and by the time you read this it will be done.
Sometimes these accomplishments provide an quiet, joyful fulfillment that no extinguished problem-fire ever will.
Personal Growth Priorities
After all, your life is about you. Perhaps you’re ready to finally finish getting that degree or completing that certification. Maybe you just want to spend more time reading and studying inspirational books. Maybe it’s time for that retreat trip, or as one of my clients declared… “It’s the Summer of Me” when she’s wants to focus on getting her exercise, eating well, and sleeping enough… consistently.
Sometimes what’s most important to you… is taking better care of you. It’s time to reconnect to the habits (or tactics to use the same language as before) that will help you take better care of yourself. How different might you feel if you gave yourself permission to put 3 solid months of effort into better self-care? You could choose just a couple tactics to focus on for a season, maybe exercising 3x week and sleeping 7-9 hours each night, commit to them and see how your world is different after 3 months of focused dedication.
What would happen if you did that? Consider it a season of Extreme Self-Care, as author Cheryl Richardson wrote about. That might give you a really good sense of whether your physical energy management has been part of your past productivity problems, don’t you think? You may even find that taking this time away from work for exercise and sleep is giving you more energy during your work day.
Too Many Priorities
We could list of many categories of priorities: family, finances, volunteer work, etc, and all of them might be relevant for you at some point in your journey.
The challenge most of us face is that when everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. In other words, we are spreading ourselves too thin trying to put everything on the front burners at once. Take a look at your stove… there are only 2 front burners. You can’t effectively juggle 6 priorities at once.
In our world of “always-on,” distraction-filled, over-stimulation, we still have control over some things. Only you can decide something is a priority, and choose to give your energy, attention, and time to it on any given day.
What most of us really lack is focus… consistent effort, dedication, and follow-through. We want to do everything right now, when the better bet might be to allow some parts of your life to hangout on auto-pilot for a season while you dedicate your focused effort to your top priority… not just for a day or a week, but a whole season.
Maybe for the summer you want to focus on being the best parent you can possibly be, and then work on launching that new website in the fall. Maybe this winter you want to get nestled into some creative project, and then have your “summer of me” to build your running and yoga practice consistently, and test out 3 new smoothie recipes each week.
We are part of the natural world, which operates in pulses. You see nature’s pulse in the cycle of the seasons, the waves on the sand, and the progression of day and night. We are biologically designed to do the same which you can see in our brainwaves, heartbeat, and circadian and ultradian rhythms. What if we leveraged that sense of pulses even more intentionally in our productivity? What if we gave our priorities a pulse allow them to ebb and flow with a rhythm of waves or cycles?
If you were going to dedicate the next 3 months to one specific focus, one area of your life and growth… what would it be? What if you could have a community of people who were also plugging into their productivity pulse with whom you could mastermind, brainstorm, and create accountability together?
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