What should you do next?
Is it better to email an existing customer, send a brochure to a prospect or improve your product a bit? Should you tweet or post a new blog post? Should you have a meeting to coordinate your team or spend ten minutes returning phone calls instead? Here’s where a priority list comes in handy.
Knowing what to do next is an unheralded skill, something successful people do really well and others struggle with.
How do you decide what to do next?
Make a Priority List
Without a priority list, you can see how making intelligent decisions is impossible, so we resort to confusing activity with productivity.
Back to work: do you have a list? Have you figured out which metric you’re trying to improve? Can you measure the impact of the choices you make all day?
I see this mistake in business all the time. Assume for a moment that your goal is to maximize profit. Why then would you spend most of your time tweaking existing deals (looking for a 3% improvement in yield) instead of spending the same time and effort doing new, game-changing deals?
Inspired By Seth Godin.
