3 Strategies Conquer Your Business To-Do List and increase Personal Time

There are 3 strategies that will help you conquer your business to-do list.

Business To-Do List Strategy #1 Clear Minded Laser Like Focus

The Key – Top-Down Design

The key to your time freedom is to clarify your priorities in a no-kidding way. This will help design your life in a top-down manner i.e. starting with what is important and needed and then designing your systems and plan based on that.

Start by identifying your top 4 or fewer primary objectives.

Don’t try to get these top four perfect – start with a guess if you have to. If you think that you have way more high priority objectives than those four, then do your best to whittle it down to the top four that are the most important – it does not mean that you are ignoring the other objectives – it just means that you know what you will need to focus more of your efforts on.

Once you have your top four or fewer primary objectives, then you can break or chunk down these objectives into monthly objectives (and even weekly objectives).

Go through your list of to-do’s and identify which items belong on the list for the next month and which ones can be done later.

Action Steps to Take Now:

1. Identify your top four maximum objectives for the year.
2. Identify which items on your to-do list you will focus on for the month and which ones you can focus on later.
3. Schedule a time every month to review your remaining to-do list items in the way described above.
4. Each time you select the to-do list items to focus on for the month, identify which ones you can delegate to others and which ones you can schedule to work on yourself.
5. Keep doing this and you will accomplish two things over time
   • Figure out how to delegate effectively and efficiently.
   • Reduce your to-do list to the point that you may never need a persistent to-do list again and have a more sophisticated system or team to handle things for you.

Business To-Do List Strategy #2 Daily Satisfaction and Results

Rule of Four

In our studies of clients, we found the optimal maximum number of projects or tasks to take on is 4 i.e. a maximum of 4 main priority projects every day.

You may have other lesser priorities, but you must learn to pick a maximum of four high priorities per day. Otherwise, you will probably make more mistakes and get lower-quality results for each project.

Sometimes, less is more – or better. This same principle should apply to how many projects your team should take on.

Action Steps to Take Now:

1. Daily – Do your best to pick the top four priority objectives per day.
2. Schedule times in your calendar to handle these four items – make sure that there are realistic time frames set for each objective.

Business To-Do List Strategy #3 The Best, Honest Way to Measure Your Freedom

Your Calendar

The following is an actual display of my calendar with the names of my private clients taken out to protect confidentiality.

You will notice a few things about this calendar. Now compare this calendar above with a calendar from one of our clients when she first started working with us:
What differences do you see between the two calendars above?

Here are a few differences that may be relevant to you:

• One calendar has way more free time or ‘choice time’ than the other.
• One calendar has items on it that have more clarity of intention than the other.
• One calendar has more double bookings than the other.
• One calendar is more ‘easier on the eye’ than the other.
• One calendar has blank transition times in between appointments as a policy

Action Steps to Take Now:

Start making your calendar look like the calendar you prefer above.

Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which calendar do you prefer?
2. Why?
3. What changes can you make to your calendar today to increase your freedom, productivity, and personal time?

Would you like some more support in identifying the business priorities that will elevate your business in the fastest way possible? Contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.