Business owners tend to be constantly stressed out while dealing with urgent matters like sales orders and answering a constant flow of emails. These urgent matters often take precedence over the more important things — like the larger tasks that will actually help your business grow. There is, however, a way to focus your attention on the important stuff. You simply have to create a “must-do” list.
A must-do list is similar to a to-do list, but rather than jotting down menial tasks, a must-do list only includes tasks that will help your business grow. This list should have two categories of tasks — the important things that will grow your business, and the tasks you love doing and are also good at. It’s important to enjoy what you do, but it’s also important not to forget the bigger picture. So while you may be really good at updating the business’ social media accounts, you need to also remember that this isn’t the only thing that needs to get done.
Start your must-do list with the things that will help you grow your business — the bigger-picture stuff like creating a new strategy, looking into marketing opportunities or creating new content for the website. Then there’s the matter of actually making sure you complete these tasks. The best way to do that is by integrating them into your schedule with a weekly action list.
This weekly action list includes a broader schedule of things that need to be completed within the week. These would be the larger tasks that will help grow your business. This list should also include the tasks that you need to complete every week, such as checking analytics. The next step, then, is to allocate actual time in your schedule to complete each task.
That’s where the daily action list comes in. This is a list of three to four tasks that you need to complete on a daily basis. This list typically won’t see much change, as it’s simply a the list of items that need to be completed every single day. These tasks might include social media updates, checking emails, writing blog articles or following up with prospective clients.
Start every workday by completing your daily action list, then move on to your to-do list (not to be confused for your must-do list). Powering through your daily action list early on in the day will open up time for those bigger, more important tasks and you’ll see your business start to grow in no time.
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