Priorities: Where Is Your Attention Going?

Many hats, many directions.

Part of the thrill in building up a small business is the opportunity and challenge of wearing different hats on any given day. For many, it’s more of a necessity – limited resources to put into different areas means having to “jump in” as gaps open up across different fronts.

One day you have your operational hat, some days you have admin hats, others you have your sales & marketing hat.

Working within and with small businesses over the years, I know this can be an exciting time – part of the fun during the build out.

As the weeks, months and years pass by, however, the constant pulling and stretching into different areas wears out even the strongest folks on the planet.

Before you know it, different areas of the business start to slip – operations gets kinked up because of admin deficiencies and sales slow down because marketing becomes inconsistent.

Suddenly that early excitement becomes a stressful game of “whack-a-mole” – attention in one area means 3 other areas flare up.

Each area starts as a small snowball, but over time as that snowball gets less attention – it eventually develops into an avalanche.

That avalanche eventually swallows up your days, leading to avalanches in other areas — and now you have no idea where to start to dig your way out.

So where do you start?

Get Your Schedule Under Control

Time.

If you don’t have your time under control – a proper schedule – your priority list becomes whatever happens to be the “chaos flavor of the day”.

While there will always be things that pop up in any given week – it’s only natural during growth periods – setting a rigid weekly schedule allows for planning periods – time to gather yourself to chart a course for prioritizing.

Before doing anything, take the time “bull” by the horns – get a calendar, map out your time (I find it handy to do “block” scheduling.)

Time is one of the few things we have 100% control over – and is the one thing you can’t get back.

Everything else follows.

Segment Your Work

Segmenting your work by core area is often a helpful way to map out priorities.

Marketing. Sales. Onboarding. Scheduling/booking. Project management. Admin.

However you split your work up, it allows you to get a full picture across those different areas of your business.

Without that full picture in every area, your priority list may be skewed – too much focus on areas that may have little-to-no impact on your progress.

Prioritize By Impact

With your schedule locked down and a full picture of work that needs to be done across different areas, now you can study the impact each item will have.

This will always be relative – working with many small businesses over the years, different areas of impact develop depending on what stage the business is in.

Typically, from what I’ve observed, for newer/smaller/micro businesses, marketing & sales becomes a cycle of deficiency as time and attention moves toward projects/output.

For middle stage/fast-growing businesses systems, infrastructure and data/measurement become a constant source of deficiency.

For older/more mature small businesses, resource management (both human and technical/physical resources) becomes a recurring issue.

Again, this is more of a relative measure based on what I’ve experienced, so your particular small business may have different bottlenecks (many attributed to how many areas run through a single person).

Set Goals, Deadlines

Once you have your time and priorities in place, set hard goals and deadlines for things to be done or accomplished.

Without deadlines for activities, it’s all too easy for those items to linger — the longer they linger, the larger the issue it becomes.

Face things head on, give yourself a time limit – and get it done.

Delegation Becomes Easier With Schedule, Priorities & Deadlines Set

With your schedule set, priorities segmented and goals in place it becomes much easier to delegate those items.

The trap then becomes “I can do this faster/better” — of course you will; you know your business better than anyone else – inside-and-out.

Even if this is the case, time is still a limiting factor – whatever time you put in that area takes you away from higher impact time to make more important decisions.

I find this the case with many marketing activities — the clients that delegate these areas allow them to focus on developing/improving customer/client relations, internal systems, infrastructure and operations; areas they wouldn’t have focused on if they spent their time performing digital marketing initiatives.

A lot of areas of business depend on momentum – marketing may be the most dependent, in many ways.

Attention isn’t just limited for you – it’s also limited for your customers & clients; letting your marketing slip is a sure way to lose your customers/client’s attention (either by neglect or others slipping into view).

So I’ll leave you with this today: where will your attention be focused this month?