Do you prioritise from the perspective of an eagle or a mouse? 

If you don’t know your priorities for any given time period, it’s really very easy to lose your focus. You can end up doing things which aren’t driving your business forward.  Scrolling anyone?

A priority for this year, is likely to be different from your priority for this month, or week.  We need to develop the skill of both eagle and mouse focus. “What’s that?” I hear you say! Eagle focus is looking at our business from a birds eye view, seeing the bigger picture for strategic planning. Mouse focus is zooming in on the detail of a singular task or series of tasks. Together all these tasks create our business as a whole.

4 Ways to Master Prioritisation

1. For a given time period, decide which type of focus is required.

This gives you clarity about what you are doing and why.  Ask yourself, ”Do I need detail oriented, mouse focus or overview oriented, eagle focus?”

2. Use your diary to reverse engineer from deadlines or other commitments.

Write down all the steps which need to take place in order for your commitment to happen.  Work backwards and diarise all the tasks, so that you have plenty of time and space to get them done. This gives you a clear picture of what you need to work on first.

3. Know your priority for just this moment, and save the rest.

In any given moment, there can only be one priority. To try to completely forget about the rest of the tasks which make up our vision is short sighted.  We need to capture all those other tasks and ideas somewhere in a way that makes sense to us. That way we don’t worry that we’ll lose or forget them. Otherwise we can try to hold on to them even more tightly, wasting valuable energy and head space.  Recording all our secondary priorities and keeping them safe enables us to focus on our current top priority.

4. Make income generation, or better still profit, the overarching priority.

Keep income generation at the top of the priority list, always.  It can be so easy to become mouse focused on a project, and forget the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.  This simple change of focus can make the difference between hitting our financial goals or hitting a plateau!  We can be heart-centred, of service and behave with great integrity. At the same time as providing well for ourselves financially.  We can create the life which brings us and those around us great joy.  What are the tasks in our businesses that consistently bring us income?  We need to keep doing them regardless of our latest project.  Where in our business can we decrease costs?  Where are we spending money which isn’t really making our life easier or increasing our profit or income?

Asking ourselves regularly “What is my priority?” and “What sort of focus do I need?” Enables us to slowly but surely, develop laser focus which can bring you massive success in both business and life.  Are you mouse, or eagle focussed?

Drop me a message if you’re stuck with prioritising in your business and life. Let’s see if I can give you a hand to get clarity about what you need to be working on right now!

With Appreciation for photo created by Photo by Kreated Media