#51 How to Prioritise Avoid the Overwhelm When Everything Is Important

The cost of not knowing yourself is simply about not living to your full potential.- Francine Beleyi

Welcome back to the Episode 51 of MWML Podcast

It’s been 3 weeks since the last episode; I’ve been busy with new projects that took almost all my time. I was preparing a keynote speech and a workshop for one of the biggest marketing event on Brand and Tech at Les Imperiales, in Casablanca, Morocco and on corporate branding and personal branding. If you are curious to see what happened, go to my website francinebeleyi.com/blog for a highlight of what happened there. It was such a great experience.

If you’ve been a keynote speaker or a Tedx speaker, you know the amount of work that goes into preparing a 15-minute presentation vs a 3-hour presentation. It’s inversely proportional. It takes 10 times more time to prepare a shorter presentation than a long one as you have to skim through the fluff to only leave out the most impactful nuggets. Then you have to remember the order in which you’d want to present it, rehearse it and ensure that you can remember this order when you have all the eyes glued on you on stage. It was one of the scariest things I’ve done this year, but the end result was so rewarding.

In the previous episode, I invited you to find and articulate your dream, one that is going to fire you up for the next 5-10 years. I hope you’ve already identified that.

My dream is to empower purpose-driven entrepreneurs to become leading voices in their industry, find their unique position in the marketplace and have profitable and sustainable businesses.

And my goal this year in 2020 is to empower 2020 of those entrepreneurs, CEOs and professionals through my programs. I also want to speak at 10 events at least this year to share my message.

Why I am telling you that?

Because I’ve started to manifest this dream as soon as I became clear about it. So be careful about what you wish for because it may come to you in a way that can be overwhelming if you are not prepared.

I have planned to do certain things before I start to speak on bigger stages and get things ready but I’ve been overwhelmed about how to manage my time to face the opportunities that came my way at the beginning of the year and have to do everything at once. So you have to get prepared and know how to manage your priorities so that it doesn’t throw you off suddenly because you are unable to cope.

This is what today’s episode is all about: How to manage your priorities when everything seems to be important.

I have 3 tips for you:

The first step is to list all of the tasks you have to do on a sheet of paper – don’t keep them in your head. Just by writing them down, it reduces the overwhelm and allow you to see objectively what you have at hand
Prioritize the most beneficial project: Look at which of these tasks if completed will yield the most important result. Let’s say that you have to finish your website and you have to write the draft of a speech coming out in 2 weeks that could potentially land you more clients. Which one should you pick? Although the website is critical for the long term, you have to prioritise writing the draft of the pitch as you’ll have to put down all the ideas of you pitch and ensure you have a structure that will work within a shorter deadline.
Seek help: for all the other tasks that you could get someone else to do, delegate or ask for help. If we take our previous example, it is not necessary you who have to do the website even if you know how to do it. You could seek the help of a professional or a friend to help with that project to speed things up,

Time is our most important asset in this busy and fast-moving world we live in. We know that we can reach our goals faster when we are clear on our priorities. Be strict with what you say yes to, focus on them and ditch the rest of your activities. The problem is that sometimes we have to prioritise what is already prioritised.

The Eisenhower Matrix can help to prioritise your actions.

This is how it works. When you have a series of tasks to do first list them all on paper. For each of the tasks Decide if the task to do is important or urgent, then ask what the consequence will be if you don’t do it. You’ll end up with 4 categories:

Urgent, important: focus on it right now
Urgent, not important: delegate it to someone else
Important, not urgent: do it later
Not important, not urgent: drop it – the fastest way to complete a project is not starting it in the first place

Ready to start prioritising your activities without stress?

Download this template to help you prioritise your activities and a daily, weekly and monthly plan to get things done and manage your time effectively.

Action points

What is your key takeaway from this episode? What are you committed to do today to find more meaning in your work and live a more meaningful life? Share your thoughts below.

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