Wednesday Work Tip #4: Don't Prioritize Your Schedule, Schedule Your Priorities

One of the best lessons I learned (and one of the hardest to apply) from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was this: "Don't prioritize your schedule -- schedule your priorities."

As entrepreneurs, what often tends to happen is that we let our schedules fill up with phone calls and meetings, or worse, we work on whatever happens to be in front of our attention -- a ringing phone, incoming e-mails, the top piece of paper in that stack on your desk, etc. -- only to find at the end of the day/week/month that we haven't accomplished the things that were truly important, like delivering work to paying clients, product development, marketing, etc.

What you have to do is take that work that is normally unscheduled and put it on your schedule -- six hours a week for marketing, ten hours a month for professional development, and four hours this week for those two proposals you've been putting off. If you show all that time as "available", you forget that there's very important, albeit unscheduled, work that you need to be doing.

Here are simple steps to help you organize this:

1. List all of the important activities for your business that are ordinarily unscheduled - marketing, product development, networking, client relationships.
2. Rate the importance of each on a scale from 1 to 10. They're all going to seem important, but consider which you would do for an hour if you only had an hour to work on one or the other.
3. With those ratings in mind, figure out how much minimum time you want to allocate each week to each activity. Don't schedule all your working hours - you need some slack to be flexible for all the things that come up on short notice.
4. Put the highest priority things early in the day/week. It's inevitable that sometimes you won't get to everything, so you want to make sure that the most important things are the ones actually getting done.
5. As demands on your time arise, you can move things to another time slot, but you will now have to assess whether whatever you're considering scheduling is really more important than that other work. If it's not, just say "no".

This technique is not going to magically allow you to do 20 hours of work in a 10-hour work day. It doesn't mean that you're going to suddenly start accomplishing every single thing on your to-do list. What it means is that you will now have a clearer picture of how you need to be spending your time so that you can make informed decisions. If something doesn't getting done, you'll be able to find some comfort in the fact that it's because it was less important than the other things you did, rather than just because the day or week slipped by and you never got to them.