It’s inevitable. As a small business owner, you will wear many, many hats.
- Marketing manager
- Bookkeeper
- Content developer
- Coach
- Technical support staff
- Advertising
- and on and on and on…
But while this type of task juggling is to be expected, you have to be aware that not all of your hats are created equal. Marketing outweighs bookkeeping, for example, because without marketing, there will be no cash to manage.
Not only that, but you have to consider how much time you’re spending in each area as well. If you spend all day tweaking the design on your website and put off sending an email to your list, what have you gained?
Sure, you might have a prettier website, but you lost an opportunity to drive traffic to your offer.
In an ideal world, you’d simply put on your CEO hat and delegate the rest, but here in the real world, we don’t always have that option. Instead, we have to work smarter and take care how we’re spending our time.
Prioritize Your Daily Tasks
We all have different skills and sweet spots when it comes to the tasks we want and need to do. You might love customer support and hate bookkeeping, while someone else enjoys the numbers game and doesn’t like dealing with the help desk. But regardless of your personal preferences, one thing is certain: money-making tasks should be at the very top of your to-do list.
That might mean product creation, email marketing, client outreach, webinar development, or something entirely different. Identify those money-making tasks in your business and be sure to prioritize them every single day.
Know the Difference Between Important and Urgent
In his classic book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey recommends prioritizing tasks based on a time-management grid. Every task is assigned to a quadrant of the grid, based on whether it is urgent, important, both, or neither.
Once you know where a task falls on the grid, you’ll immediately know what you should be working on. For example, marketing and planning are important but not urgent. A ringing phone is urgent, but not important. The sales page for your new program, which is launching tomorrow, is both urgent AND important.
So before you prioritize your daily to-do list, think about where each of your tasks falls in the quadrant, and schedule them accordingly.
Will you always be working on the best task for right now? Probably not. Nor will you always use your time as wisely as you could. But by making a conscious effort to organize and prioritize your days, you’ll find it’s a lot less stressful and overwhelming to manage your small business.
Paul, your article could not have come at a better time for me. January always seems to be the busiest month with client work and managing other projects on my plate. I have actually incorporated using time-blocking on an online calendar to keep me on track with priority tasks. So far, it’s working. As humans, we can still get off-track and think this needs to done…this needs to be done. But because we wear many hats in our business, it makes sense to always put your money-making tasks at the top.
Time blocking helps ms stay on task. And I would struggle without my online calendar to let people schedule time during the time blocks I allow.
I’m in the process of prioritizing and scheduling both work and home projects. I find it actually gives me more time by setting a schedule.
Setting up a schedule helps me keep on track.
I’ve got all the hats on! This is a great reminder of what is important and gives me some ideas of how to create my To Do lists going forward.
Glad to have helped, Jyll!
Just call me a hat rack! 😀
That’s why I’m a little concerned about whether I can get enough content together to cover daily posts. Now, I have to go write.
I can help with the ideas to write… you can help by doing the writing!
Money making task.This phrase I will remember Paul.Very helpful indeed.
Yes, Dr. Amrita – Money Making Task is an important concept if you are in business. IF someone is just blogging for the fun of it, it may not be that important.
Thank you for the reminder! I have to remember that I can’t do everything and I need to either delegate or schedule or not do! I want to start this year off right!
No better time than the present, Dominique!
As always, concise and helpful! I do feel like I am wearing the wrong hat at times while at others it is too many, but prioritizing and actually being in the moment means I pick the right hat to wear at the right time so I am working on it…
Figuring out times of the day you do things best, can help you decide which hat you can wear and when.
Paul this is very helpful.
Thanks!