How to Prioritize Anything, in Your Business and Life: 6 Critical Points

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Terry McIntosh, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.

Business expert Peter Drucker said “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Makes sense, but how do we know what we should be doing when everything is important?

President Dwight Eisenhower created a method which was then used by Steven Covey in his book “The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People”

There are only two criteria for determining the priority:
1) Important – will this task make a difference?
2) Urgent – does this task have a time pressure?

President Eisenhower then added the actions we should follow after we have determined the level of importance and the level of urgency. He called them the “four Ds”.

They are:
1) Do the tasks that are high importance and high urgency.
2) Decide and schedule the tasks with high importance but low urgency.
3) Delegate the tasks that are low importance, but have high urgency.
4) Dump the tasks that waste your time.

So now we have that process, but how do you order the tasks when there are more than one at the same important and urgent level?

Here is what I do….
I look at which one will have the largest impact to my life or business, or which will have the highest risk, and make that the first to do. A shorter version of that is to ask yourself… “What task is closest to the money?” Is updating my website more important than following up on a sales lead?

So that should give you a great set of tools to use when you are feeling overwhelmed and help you get your priorities in the right order.

— Terry “BizCoachTerry” McIntosh