What Comes First, Prioritization or Planning?

If you have a long list of to-dos and at times you feel like 24 hours is not enough, then setting priorities for your life is crucial if you want to get things done. Prioritization means to arrange (items to be attended to) in order of their relative importance. The more projects you are involved in and the more you do for your business and personal life, the more you need to prioritize your activities. Creating priorities is a bit different from planning your day.  What comes first, that wagon or the horse? In this case, what should you do first, plan, or prioritize?

You need to be clear on what is most important to you before you begin to plan your day. If you plan your day based on everything that needs to get done vs. planning your day according to importance, you may end up “doing” things but not accomplishing much. Here are three super simple things you can do prioritize your day before you plan:

1. What is most important for you today? Priorities can shift based on previous days, mood, etc. Before you begin your day, be clear on your intention and what you want to accomplish. If nothing else happens today, what must take place? Identify what you want to achieve and set your priority and intention for today based on that only. If you manage to accomplish others things, great! If not, you have accomplished what you set out to do, which is very powerful!
2. Limit your priorities. If everything that needs to get done seems to be of high importance to you, you must then use the ABCs of prioritization. After making your list, place an A next to things of super duper high importance that must get done today. Place a B next to things that should get done today but won’t stop you from moving forward if it doesn’t get done. Place a C next to the things that will only get done after everything else and won’t cause panic if they are not done.
3. Evaluate your progress. At the end of your day, look at what you accomplished and evaluate your efforts. If there is area for improvement, then note what went wrong and try again tomorrow. By taking a closer look at the way you handle your priorities will help you create a better success for each day that follows.

Prioritization is a learned skill and it gets better and better with time. Take time before beginning your day to get organized, prioritize, and then plan for your success! I’d love to hear how you organize your day and what has worked! Share your comments below!

The 7 Failures That Will Make You a Better Leader

“Success Covers a Multitude of Blunders”.

That was a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw, and it has always stuck with me throughout my career as a leader and executive.

What it ultimately told me was yes, I was going to fail – multiple times. But if I was truly determined to overcome, or “cover” them, I absolutely needed to learn from every failure, and leverage that accumulated learning into success.

In so many ways, I’ve grown to appreciate my failures – as counterintuitive as that may seem.    Because I now know if I just let them go, without reflection, then they were doomed to be repeated.

There are 7 failures that I believe bring the best improvement opportunities:

• Failure to Prioritize – Many a bad decision has come from our lack of perspective on the importance of one thing over another. The key learning here is to fully grasp the concept of “opportunity cost” – the cost of NOT doing something in favor of something else.
• Failure to Decide – If the buck is going to stop with us, then we need the courage to make timely decisions, regardless of consensus or the lack of 100% of the information needed to make them.  We learn that more often than not, it’s better to “do something” then let fear and inertia overtake us.
• Failure to Progress – When a target is reached, the bar must be raised. And when that target is hit, it must be raised again. And again.  Complacency is a state that HAS to be avoided, at all costs, and the ultimate learning here is that continuous improvement is an essential focus of any enterprise.
• Failure to Praise – Great talent needs to be nurtured and retained, in a manner that goes well beyond the paychecks and bonuses.    These lessons come hard, after the loss of individuals who felt unappreciated and undervalued.  We learn that humans need to hear those simple words – “You did a great job”.
• Failure to Trust – When first taking on a leadership role, there’s always a strong “pull” to be involved in every decision, or to want to “sign off” on literally every dollar spent or contract signed.  Until we learn that trust is an essential part of great leadership, we are doomed to overwork and a huge misapplication of time and talent.
• Failure to Mediate – Every organization will have conflicts, whether it is person to person, or department to department.  Successful leaders learn that stepping into the breach to resolve them, rather than standing back or ignoring them, can avoid even bigger problems down the road, and build influence throughout an organization.
• Failure to Fire – Nobody likes to fire anybody.   It’s one of the toughest things a leader will ever do.  But when you know in your gut it’s time to cut the cord, cut it.  Don’t wait.  Your gut will usually be right.  The failures here are a lesson to the heart – it can’t get in the way of these decisions (but it certainly can come into play in the manner in which it is handled).

Remember this lesson from the baseball diamond:  You don’t have to bat 1,000% to be successful, but when you swing and miss, get out of the box, think, and then learn before you step back in and hit that home run.

Lead well!

Post written by Terry Starbucker