Prioritizing with your Home Based Business Part 2

Yesterday we talked about prioritizing with your home based business. We covered how to categorize tasks, the first two types we looked at were of high priority topics, urgent and important and not urgent but important. Tonight we will briefly cover the remaining two categorizations of tasks for prioritizing.

There is the urgent, but not important tasks. Those include items classified as needless interruptions, unnecessary reports, unimportant meetings, phone calls and e-mails and lastly dealing with other people's minor issues. Granted, what you might consider 'other people's minor issues' may be major issues to those other people. If you determine what they want you to do is basically a minor issue, don't just come out and tell them that, but either find a more diplomatic way to ask them or let them know that you are tapped out and cannot take on any additional projects. These tasks that you determine to be urgent but not important are a serious drain of your precious time away from your urgent and important tasks and your not urgent but important tasks.

It is critical that you do not get waylaid into performing these menial tasks, because they will become huge time wasters for you and not help you to reach your goal of making your home based business profitable. Keep in mind that these tasks may be urgent and may appear to be important, but they are not really important to you and your goals. Very often the items that fall in this category are more likely someone else's priorities that were delegated to you. If you do not report to this person at a regular job, you should re-delegate those tasks back. Better yet, you should not accept the delegated tasks in the first place, citing that they will have to fall in priority and won't be attempted until all the other important/urgent and not urgent, but important tasks are completed. Only at that time will you be able to tackle the not important, but urgent tasks. Honestly though, even if you finish your first two sets of tasks, there will always be additional tasks that fall into the important/urgent and not urgent/important categories. You need to continue to focus on what is good for you, your family and your home based business.

The last category of prioritization is the not urgent/not important tasks. These include trivia, busywork, irrelevant phone calls and e-mails, basic time wasters, lots of hours in front of the television, and time spent surfing the Internet. You do need to take some time to unwind, but be aware of how much time you really spend unwinding. If you find you spend about 3 hours a night watching TV sitcoms, then you really are wasting your precious time. Sometimes it may seem like surfing the Internet is a major time waster, and it can be, but if you are researching a particular new product or line of business with an eye towards including it in your business plan, then that task is not a time waster. When we identify surfing the Internet as a time waster, that is when you are just 'looking' around and not focusing on any particular piece of information.

The Internet is a great resource for information, but since you can get so much information in such a short period of time, you can end up wasting a lot of time learning irrelevant trivia and not gain any useful knowledge towards growing your business. How many times have you talked to someone who had an amazing grasp of trivia but couldn't think their way out of a brown paper bag? You don't want to become one of those people.

A key to continuing to only work tasks that are important and not urgent (preparation, prevention, planning) is write those items down and review them weekly and daily to be sure you remain on track. By weekly planning you are proactively planning how you will spend your time rather than reacting to problems as they occur.

You should regularly review your goals and what you expect to see. By doing that you will continue to stay on track and not stray into time-wasting tasks. We will all get distracted and find ourselves wandering off into a path that really eats up our time. By constantly reviewing our goals, we will only wander away for a short period of time before we are reminded of our original goals and put ourselves back on track to the road of success.

Tomorrow we will take a break from striving to improve your home based business and talk about something completely different.

Until tomorrow...