10 Steps to Your Most Important Work

Every minute you are not working on “Your Most Important Work” means you are not working at your full potential!

For most entrepreneurs and business owners, the day is filled with things that need to get done.

The busy work.

If you are using lists to track your pending work it may actually look something like this.

Lists are a great first step for getting things done and not forgetting things.

But they are overwhelming.

They are also potentially incomplete. The strategic stuff you need to do might not even make the list or be lost somewhere in the pile.

Buried in the noise.

Checking off items on your list may become your primary goal rather than results.

But what if you are not working on the right stuff?

10 Steps for Gaining Control of Your Day

1. Start each day fresh,
2. Review what you have been working on over the past day (or week),
3. Celebrate the successes,
4. Reflect and learn,
5. Consider any new items that have materialized,
6. Look at the things that if done would make a huge difference in your future,
7. Make a list of 3-5 items with a mix of:
   • Moves business forward,
   • Must get done,
   • Builds your energy.
8. Allocate time to each item,
9. Schedule the items in a way that builds momentum (leave slack for emergencies).
10. Do them.

Spend 5-10 minutes every day planning and repeat the steps every day for the next 3 months. Get your entire team doing this. Consider using a tool to improve execution and visibility. 

You will be moving closer to your goals and dreams faster than you ever thought possible.

Focusing on your most important work allows you to "Manifast" your full potential.

Comments

[Nash_jen]

Great post, Doug! So many people get bogged down in the how (tactics) that they forget the what (strategy). As a result, they ping pong throughout the day and don't make much, if any, forward progress.

I think both successes and failures should be celebrated so to speak because we can learn so much from them.

Last, focusing on high value tasks is very important. Duties should be assigned appropriately. I had a talk this week with an entrepreneur who was struggling to justify paying someone to do certain tasks when she didn't have the money in hand first. I told her that if she spent the time closing deals, etc. instead of order fulfillment of whatever she could more than pay for the person. The math only works if you replace low value tasks with high value ones.

[Douglas Wagner]

Thank you Jennifer. That has been my experience and observation as well.

The failures are part of the reflection I mentioned but I never thought of celebrating them... maybe for what they teach.

The chicken and egg of hiring someone to get benefit without being sure you can afford it is a normal dilemma. I think unless you have faith, or better, have seen it work it is a hard one to accept even though it makes sense.

Thanks for your wisdom.

[Amy Wells]

Doug,
This is really good. I was getting bogged down with the 'daily to do', until I came up with an open and close list for my team. They began to cover all the 'to do' and I am now free to create more business, so I can hire more people to do the increased to do's. LOL

Great post.

[Lisa Settle]

Enjoyed this blog Doug. Reminded me how easy it is to get snowed under without knowing it.

[Douglas Wagner]

Thanks Amy. Love the story about how you are able to work on your business and hire more To-Do-ers. Awesome.

[Douglas Wagner]

Glad you enjoyed it Lisa. Speaking of snow, did you get any today out your way?