Priority Pinball - my ducks are mutinous!

"I had a plan. I swear".

The infamous refrain of the creative sparky-brain. You distinctly remember sitting down to plan your week.

You even have a template for it!

Nevertheless, you’re once again ricocheting between tasks and chasing your tail - emails, content creation, client work, system tweaks, “urgent” updates, and that one podcast someone said you must listen to before you create your next campaign.

Once again, you're taking loads of action, but it's not creating traction.

I call this The Priority Pinball phenomenon.

I've witnessed my dance with it, so I recognise it in my clients.

And it seems particularly virulent at the moment. Loads of brilliant, purposeful businesswomen I’m working with are caught in it. They’re ambitious, capable, and deeply committed to their impact…. Still, the sheer volume of competing priorities feels overwhelming, exhausting and distracting, taking them off track and down creative cul-de-sacs.

Why is this happening?

I have a few thoughts about this.

• Everything feels equally important: Fast brains tend to flatten the hierarchy of tasks, making “refreshing your homepage” feel just as important as “following up that lead.”
• An interest-driven rather than importance-driven focus: The new, the quirky, the curious, and the urgent monopolise the spotlight, even when we do have big-picture priorities quietly waiting in the wings.
• Perfectionism & overthinking: I prefer to see this as "over ideation" - my brain delivers 17 equally viable and attractive options... but unfortunately, this can mean I stay in “prep mode,” tweaking, researching, and reworking instead of, Seth Godin style, shipping the damn thing! I need to take my own B+ Work medicine.
• Rejection sensitivity & people-pleasing: Hello, confidence, see-saw and emotional pendulum! A higher-than-average need for approval our wiring gives us means other people's priorities can get in the way of ours.
• The Overcommitment Spiral: If you say yes to all the things, all the ideas, projects, and collaborations, Priority Pinball is virtually guaranteed! A systematic pause, giving yourself deliberate space to first discern and then decide if this is the right time and right thing, helps.
• Time blindness Without an accurate sense of how long things will take, we can overestimate what we can get done in the time we've allowed, which can seriously compromise our ability to prioritise and get stuff done. This little gadget below - a visual timer, is changing the game for me! Instead of arguing with my alarms - "that was NOT 15 minutes!!!" I'm starting to get a much better handle on the passage of time and what I can actually get done in a set period. Makes setting priorities a bit easier... I've hotlinked the image below to Amazon, where I bought it - I have the watermelon version, and there are other fruits, too! Yes, there are "adult" alternatives, but... ??

Try Now. Next. Later. thinking.

I share this simple framework with my clients as a filtering tool. You can't do all the things right now. So let's reconnect to the big picture we're working towards, and then box the actions in this order. To do this well, we need to know what these time/action concepts look like for you. For me, now is typically this week, next is this month, and later is within this quarter.

What might they be for you?

The Shift: From scattered to strategic

My one-to-one Strategy Workshops are where the biggest magic happens. Because I'm not in your business, I can spot the gaps and opportunities more quickly and discern how best to prioritise your actions for impact (and sanity).

And because I'm not in your head, I'm never going to beat you up with a groundhog day litany of "why can't you just get it right/get it done/do it as quickly and easily as everyone else seems to..."

Promise ??

For now, allow me to share one of the many fab wee tools and resources I've developed over the years that I know will help.

This one, in particular, can move the needle with you right now. Today. I call it the Priority Reset.

It is NOT another prescriptive do-it-this-way or you are doomed to failure productivity template. Instead, it’s a sparky-brain-friendly resource to help you:

• Pause and identify your actual needs (before leaping into possibly premature action)
• Sort your menagerie of competing priorities into simple, actionable categories
• Make clear, energising choices and move forward with renewed focus
• Build a habit of resetting, not just reacting, for building momentum, not just movement

Because you deserve to sidestep that debilitating feeling of perpetual potential

Like most things I've created, the Priority Reset was born out of necessity and tested on me. I liked it. It helped. So, I started to share it with other sparky-brained women.

It's getting thumbs up!

I'd love you to love it too! Or at least find it helpful. That's always my goal.

You can either send me a message here on LinkedIn, and I'll send a copy right back to you, or you can click on the image below to visit my website and grab it.

While we can't completely eliminate the reality of multiple and often competing demands, we can stop playing pinball, bit by bit, reset by reset.

Let’s help those mutinous ducks line up… even if it’s just for today.

Warmly,

Angela

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