How to prioritize for performance

SUMMARY

• Do you spend at least 60% of your week working on activities aligned with your priorities? Because it is actually what the highest performers do!
• If you’d love to become a “Master Prioritizer” too and be the one driving your own calendar, the key is often simply more clarity! Difficult to perform at your highest potential if your time is spent on random tasks, projects not aligned with your goals, distractions and other people’s urgencies, right?
• In this article, I am sharing with you the 3 aspects you need to get 2000% clear on to prioritize better and support your performance.

DID YOU KNOW?

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2. The highest performers in the world are not that different from you and me. They have just found out what really matters when it comes to creating a successful life in a sustainable way.?Discover their secrets in my free masterclass!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

My opinion – you can never prioritize too much or too often in life! Actually, I always prioritize time in my agenda to make sure I can get clear on my priorities and re-prioritize when necessary. If you are not yet as obsessed as I am about being the one in control of your agenda and knowing exactly what has to move forward today, you will be after reading this article!

Prioritization is a priority itself if you want to perform successfully and feel that you are contributing at your best level. The better you know what you want to accomplish, the more focused your efforts can be, the easier you can align your actions and decisions, the faster you will create momentum and results. It also makes it way easier to use your energy in the right place, to say no to things that do no make sense and to remove any distractions.

Just to give you a statistic here, the highest performers in the world report working 60% of their week on tasks that are meaningful and aligned with the contribution they want to make. 60% is a huge number and most likely not what you have currently in your calendar!

The root cause for that? Prioritizing is not something we are always diligent with, at least to explore in depth to reach the levels of clarity necessary. Sometimes, we have a rough sense of what is important to do without having the solid understanding of what has to happen exactly. Sometimes, our priorities are evolving, and we don’t always stop and think about what this implies. Sometimes, we go through life without any priorities at all and we follow what the world is telling us should be important to do. Sometimes, we cannot choose what is truly a priority (in one of my former companies, we had top priorities, top top priorities and top top top priorities – bottom line, we had no priorities!).

Obviously, you can easily guess that this is not the most efficient way to perform and get results. From running everywhere like a headless chicken, feeling you have too much on your plate or knowing deep down that the work you deliver is not meaningful, it is easy to feel dissatisfied with your own performance. The only way to regain control about what’s happening with your time and where to put your efforts is simply to reach another level of clarity and intentionality.

Here are 3 things you need to be 2000% clear on to help you prioritize in a way that supports your performance.

#1 – What you want to say YES to

What does matter for you? What do you want to put on your plate as a goal/priority? What would truly make a difference for your contribution? What would you be proud to spend time working on?

The keyword here is YOU. Because far too often, we go through life by following what we get suggested to do by other people or by life events. Or the priorities we had get derailed by emergencies that become new priorities and make us lose track of the long-term picture.

One way to avoid that is to decide in advance what should always be a YES, what could be a YES if there is time available, and what should never be a YES.

There are 2 levels where you can already start thinking in advance and take decisions on what has to happen:

?? Your daily non-negotiables

What has to happen every day for you to perform and show up at your best? What are the habits part of your routine that you are 100% committed to because they are empowering you?

Your day should be organized around your daily non-negotiables YESES, not the contrary! Maybe taking a full hour lunch break away from the computer combined with a walk helps you recharge through the day. Maybe you want to guarantee that you can spend your evenings focusing only on your family and not answering emails. Maybe having a daily call with a very good friend is a powerful way to lift you up!

Whatever you know is key to your performance, book it in your calendar, commit and defend the crap out of it!

?? Longer-term priorities or new opportunities

What are the key criteria you are looking at to choose activities that matter to you? What would be a roaring YES from you?

Get clear on what would be a great fit for you and your long-term vision. You probably know actually from past good/poor decisions and projects what is important to consider so that you can feel that your time is put at good use. Have a look back and create your filters so that you know exactly why you are saying yes!

Just to give you some ideas, this is what I am filtering my choice of business projects at the moment: Was it planned? Does it compete with other goals I have? Do I look forward to work with this person long-term? Does it help me practice/build a skill I wanted to work on this year? Do I feel excited about this? Am I the best person to contribute here? Do I have enough time to do the work at the excellence level I expect from myself?

#2 – What boundaries you have to set

Going after your priorities means that you will often have to say no to the world’s priorities and to other people’s priorities. Productivity and focus are often “social activities” where you need the courage to put boundaries to make it more manageable. It can be challenging at the beginning, but it becomes much easier once you are super clear on your yeses and how putting these boundaries fits into the bigger picture!

Sometimes, it will just be a case of learning to say “no” systematically before saying yes and using the filtering questions you have defined to decide if that could be a yes.

Other times, it might be more about educating people around you on what time you are protecting for your daily non-negotiables, when they can book meetings with you, what exact time you have available to discuss with them, etc…

Sometimes, you might need to push back if someone is making too many requests and express that things are not feasible for you. Or ask for more clarity on what the exact goal and deadlines are, just to make sure you are not working on meaningless tasks.

In all cases, make sure that your boundaries are strong and clearly communicated to protect the time that you decided to allocate to your own priorities and non-negotiables.

#3 – How to translate your priorities into daily tasks

Once you got the big picture on your priorities and know your yeses, you can start the strategic planning to make sure your yeses happen and your boundaries stay straight!

The first step is to identify what has to happen on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to move forward on your priorities. What are the tasks that have to be completed? What are the actions that will lead you to complete in the most effective way? How much time will each of these actions take?

Then, the most important step - block the time already in your calendar, including of course your daily non-negotiables! The more in advance you can block these times in your agenda, the more likely you will stick to your priorities and not becoming reactive to whatever else happens. You can always take on new activities if you see time left in your agenda after you have already factored the time for your priorities! 90 days in advance is a good time scale to look at if you want to start planning strategically.

Make sure as well to be clear on how keep the day “digestible”. 3 is the magic number here – no more than 3 priorities to work towards, no more than 3 tasks that you must complete on a given day. This will simplify your life and make sure you have the energy to move properly through the day. If you want a more advanced level here, you can also set a time by when you want to have completed these tasks to give you an extra boost of motivation.

Did you find this article insightful? Let me know in the comments!

Clo - Your Expanded Coach