Common Mistakes Leaders Make When Prioritizing (Episode 17)

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Hey everyone.

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about prioritization, and probably not in the way that totally you think of. There’s some things about it that I think that we’ll talk about kind of more toward the end, that mistakes that we do make, that we sometimes don’t think about when it comes to prioritizing.

And when we make those mistakes,

iIt really hurts us and it keeps us from being as productive and growing as we can because we’re prioritizing and focusing on the wrong things. So please stick around.

I know last episode was key, the keys of time management. This one’s prioritization. For some that seems simplistic or easy, but it’s really important because if you don’t prioritize well, then you’re not gonna be productive. You’re not gonna get results. You’re not gonna get the things done that you need to get done.

So I encourage you to listen really well and check yourself on all these because I’m gonna be talking about different mistakes that we make and let’s make sure, I want you to make sure that you’re not making these mistakes, especially the ones toward the end.

Not prioritizing at all

So first, sometimes we don’t prioritize at all. And of course, that hurts us because we’re just doing anything that’s in front of us. We’re not necessarily doing what’s important. Of course, that’s going to hurt us in our productivity because we’re not prioritizing anything.

So of course you want to prioritize what’s most important, what’s not important.

Last time we talked about three keys of time management, knowing what’s important, doing what’s important, getting to know what’s important and then prioritize it and do it.

Not planning

Second is we don’t take the time to plan. So you wanna make sure, we talked about last time, you take time, set the day before if you can, look at the big picture, see what your goals and mission and everything is, the things that are most important.

And then prioritize your plan and what you’re going to work on based on what’s important. So you’ll use your calendar or to-do list, however you do it, prioritize what’s important.

So sometimes we don’t plan. Next is because we don’t plan, again, we sometimes get stuck in the urgency. And if we don’t plan or if we’re just allow ourselves to be taken on by what’s happening around us, we can easily start prioritizing and thinking that the things around us that are urgent are what’s most important.

And when we do that, we start doing things that aren’t important. So even when craziness is happening around those people coming with problems, whatever it may be, we still need to make sure we have our plan of what’s most important.

Cause when you have a plan, when you prioritize, these are the things that’s most important, when the spontaneous comes, then you can be like, “Oh, this thing’s happening. But when I compare it to what’s important, it’s really not important right now. I can do that thing later after I do what’s most important.”

Or you can say, “Okay, look at my list. Ooh, that’s something that’s important that has something to do with our goal that we need to get fixed now. So let me focus and do that now.”

So if you plan and prioritize ahead of time, that helps you be able to even when the urgent craziness happens to still help you do what’s important.

Prioritizing too much

Sometimes one mistake we make is that we prioritize too much. We’re trying to do too much as leaders. Or we, we say to our team that everything’s important. You should be doing everything. This goal, this goal, this goal, this goal, everything’s important.

And when that happens, that really hurts us because we may have a lot of important things, but we need to decide what’s most important because when you try to prioritize too much, then either one of a few things happens.

One, you don’t do anything well. You do a little bit of everything, but nothing gets done well because you’re trying to do everything. It’s frustrating to your employees because what do they work on? They can cause analysis paralysis because you have 5, 10, 15 things you’re trying to work on and you’re like, “Well what do I work on first? I don’t know what’s most important because they’re all important.”

So then what happens sometimes is that you think everything’s important and you end up doing nothing and doing something easy because you don’t know what to do. And you end up doing none of those because you have too much to prioritize.

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin in their book Extreme Ownership talk about this, they call it prioritize and execute. You need to decide what’s the most important thing, focus on that, execute it, prioritize the next, and go on.

So when it comes to your goals, generally if you can focus on one, get done, focus on others, sometimes there may be multiple things, maybe two, maybe three that are your priorities, but you need to know what’s most important. You need to not do too much, otherwise you’re going to hurt yourself a lot.

Chasing shiny objects

Another mistake sometimes we make as leaders when it comes to prioritizing is that we chase every shiny object. This seems like something awesome we should pursue. Boom, let’s do it. Oh, wait, no, let me show, oh, there’s another shiny object. Let me chase that.

And I’ve done, honestly, I’ve done that sometimes before. I see a new idea or something like that. I want to pursue that new thing, even though we’re not done with what we’re already doing. And that’s something I sometimes have to be careful with because ideas coming and I want to keep pursuing. And it’s not that that’s bad, but we have to make sure we’re not just chasing and quickly changing because that can be frustrating to our team.

That can keep us from actually being productive because if we don’t ever finish something that we start, then we’re not getting results. So be careful about chasing different objects.

The sunk cost trap

Now, other ways that we prioritize poorly that sometimes we don’t think about, and I want you to think about, if you’ve heard of the sunk cost fallacy, is that sometimes when things are failing and we’ve invested time and money in something, we want to keep investing time and money because we don’t wanna waste what we’ve already invested.

So if you’re in a relationship for two years, you don’t want to end it because you feel like you’ve wasted those two years. Or if you work and invest in the project for hours of time and millions of dollars in a project and it’s failing, you want to keep investing in it, otherwise you feel like you’ve wasted all that time and money. It’s a sunk-cost fallacy.

The fact is you’ve already wasted, not wasted, you’ve already spent and used that time and money, you can’t get it back. The question is what do you do with your money and time in the future?

Focusing on the wrong thing

And so what happens often, when it comes to prioritizing is that we put our resources, our time, and our people on the wrong things, and we prioritize the wrong things.

For example, sometimes we focus on problems. So there’s problems happening and we put our best people, we put most of our resources, we put a lot of our time fixing problems, and we just give opportunities kind of whatever’s left over. But that’s the wrong mindset.

And Peter Drucker, I believe it was in his book, Managing for a Time of Change or something like that, maybe in a couple of them, he talked about this mentality. He says, what you’re really doing is just disaster… you can fix disasters, you can do disaster control, but focusing on problems will not help you get to growth. It will not help you grow. Only opportunities help you grow.

So if, when you focus on problems, just fixing problems, you can maintain the status quo maybe, but it’s not going to move you forward.

It happens sometimes, say a sales region is not doing well, so they put the best people on the region that’s not doing well, instead of putting them on the best to maximize the best. Or there’s a product that’s failing, so we’re gonna put our money and resources and time on this product that’s failing, instead of investing in what’s working and other things that are coming up in the pipeline, that may work really well.

Does that kind of make sense?

Focus on opportunities instead

Sometimes we focus on the problems, and put our resources in that, or the things that are failing, instead of the things that can move us forward and drive us up.

So instead of focusing and prioritizing the problems, we need to prioritize our opportunities and the things that can cause us to grow. Put our best people on our opportunities. Put your best people on the things that are coming up. Don’t put your salespeople, the best salespeople, in the worst regions. Put them in the best ones so they can maximize it.

Don’t focus your best people on trying to fix problems or products that aren’t working as well anymore, put them on the products that are up and coming, that are innovating and the things that are doing well, they even make them do better.

If you want the most results and growth, that’s how you get it by putting your best and resources on what can move you forward.

So we covered a lot of different things about prioritizing, so I hope this helps you when it comes to your time, but also how you put your people and resources and what you put your people and resources in.

I’ll see you next time.

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