How To Prioritize in Your Business When Everything is Important

How do you prioritize in your business when everything is important?

Being a founder, CEO, or business owner, I highly encourage you to think about this question.

Once you start thinking about your response, you might be thinking that maybe not everything is really important. So you start reviewing the list of your so-called important things to see what you can cross off. But then, an hour later you still staring at the list and have nothing crossed off.

In fact, you’ve added more to the list!

The truth is that when we can identify what are the important tasks that we need to do in our role in our business, we ACTUALLY get things done.

In this article, I be sharing some strategies with you to help you prioritize tasks and actions in your business so you can ACTUALLY get things done. When you apply these strategies in your business, you are going to start seeing the benefits of your strategic actions.

How Previous Experiences Can Help Us

I want to share a little of my background with you to provide an example. I worked as a School Psychologist in K-12 schools in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands prior to becoming a Strategic Business Coach. I also worked as a Special Education Director during the time when the world shutdown because of the COVID pandemic. 

In working as a school psychologist or as a Special Education Director, I had to learn how to prioritize. I also had to learn that not every important task was a priority. Plus, what is a priority for someone else does not automatically mean that it is a priority for me.

Put it this way, when others wait until last minute to get a task done that they know they had to do for the past 2 weeks, a month, or even 3 months, I learned that their issue was not my issue to reorganize my entire day or week to help them finish the task last minute.

Why?

Because their priority is not my priority!

But trust me, I didn’t get to that conclusion overnight. There were several times when I told myself that it wouldn’t take that long to help that other person. Just a few minutes and I had a few minutes that I could use to help them. But it never was just a few minutes. 

Sometimes, helping someone else complete a task took a few hours and even a few days. While helping that person, my tasks weren’t getting done. So when I was done helping that person and they are moving on with their to-do lists, guess what, I was falling behind on what I have to do. Please do not read this as I am wanting to blame others for not getting things done for me. That's not what I am doing because I made the decision to help that person in the first place, knowing what I had on my To-Do list.

Be honest, we can be the biggest blocks to getting our own stuff done. We look at our lists of things to do and because everything is so important, we start working on several of them at once. We pull things from any location on the list because they are ALL important.

But then the end of the day or week comes and we look back at our progress, only to realize that what we set out to do at the beginning of the week morphed into some other schedule where we added things.

Then the key things we needed to do that week, didn’t get done because we moved them to the next day and the next day and the next and still didn’t do them or started them but didn’t finish them.

I know that I am guilty of having done that until I attended a training at work and learned of a concept that was new to me. 

What is a Non-negotiable? 

I remember being at a beginning of the year department-wide training and hearing the term non-negotiable. I initially thought that the person was using that word simply to be another word for important or priority.

Then they mentioned the word again, but that next time it was while presenting a graphic and giving examples of what they meant. After that session, I realized that they really are things in my non-negotiable category and others that are not.

It was when I was able to look at my roles and responsibilities and my list of things to do that I was able to identify my non-negotiables so that I would always have time to get them done. But more specifically, get them done by the due date that I wanted to complete them.

Flash forward a few years when I was completing my Doctorate in General Psychology with an emphasis in Industrial and Organizational Psychology while working full-time and enjoying the other parts of my life, I was reminded again about the importance of non-negotiables. Focusing on those helped me to successfully complete my doctoral program in 4 years instead of the typical 5 to 8 years. 

Now as a small business owner running my own coaching and consulting company, I continue to remember the importance of identifying my non-negotiables so that I can get tasks done in my business and for my clients. I want to clarify something. Your non-negotiables can change depending on what is happening in your life. By this I mean that the non-negotiables that I had a School Psychologist were not the same as working as a School Psychologist and being a full-time doctoral student. Now as a small business owner, they are still not the same. 

But what are non-negotiables and what do they have to do with your business, right?

Let’s start first with a definition of non-negotiables.

In an article from The Blueprint Practice, Carole Bozkurt defined non-negotiables as being those deal-breakers that are unique to you and your business. Bozkurt also defined non-negotiables as those things that you will and will not accept from your clients or customers or yourself.

I view non-negotiables as those principles that are connected to the values in my company that help me drive my company towards success. Most importantly, towards the mission for my business. As I was researching for this video, I found that the Talented Ladies Club as a similar definition.

Examples of Non-negotiables

So what are some examples of non-negotiables?

David K. Williams, wrote a book that he titled 7 Non-Negotiables of Winning: Tying Soft Skills to Hard Traits. In his book, he lists seven non-negotiables. That list included:

1. Respect
2. Belief
3. Trust
4. Loyalty
5. Commitment
6. Courage
7. Gratitude

These types of non-negotiables can help especially when you have a team.

But okay, those non-negotiables may not fit in with you and that’s fine. Because your non-negotiables are those things that have meaning for you and your business as a small business owner. So maybe your non-negotiables are around your well-being and time with your family or maybe not. It could be that you can relate more to non-negotiables such as these suggested by Trevor Mauch, founder of InvestorCarrot:

1. Focusing on one big thing at a time rather than spreading yourself thin and losing your motivation to keep going

2. Do tasks and actions that are aligned with your mission for why you started your business

3. Have consistency

Peter Voogd wrote about other non-negotiables in an article on The Entrepreneur. Voogd's non-negotiables included:

1. Stop spending time waiting for things to happen when you can create the change that you want

2. Face your fears and take risks

3. Keep a focus on continuing to grow and develop

4. Have a sense of urgency to thrive

Summary

At the end of the day, whatever it is that you identify to be your non-negotiables, there must be actions aligned to those non-negotiables and you have to allocate time on your schedule to get those actions done. When you focus on your non-negotiables, you will be better able to plan the order in which you want to complete your tasks.

In other words, you will be able to say what are your non-negotiables and what are nice-to-complete tasks. You can even use your non-negotiables list to delegate tasks to other members on your team or hire independent contractors.

So sorry if you were expecting a ready-done list of the non-negotiables that you can runaway with. You need to think about your values and mission of your business so that you can identify your non-negotiables then the actions connected with those non-negotiables.

If you are ready to get some help identifying your non-negotiables and creating a plan to execute them, submit your coaching application and see if you qualify for a customized coaching program to meet your specific needs.

Thank you for taking the time to read my article.

Regards,

Dr. Priscilla "Dr. P" Kucer

Solutions+Actions=Results! (SoAR!)