Make Business Decisions and Prioritize Project Tasks

Finish the tasks you start

It’s sometimes difficult to complete large tasks, but letting them go stale is the best way to discourage yourself. Incomplete projects generate physical, mental, and emotional clutter.

Enlist the help of the ignorant

Get your spouse or a friend to make suggestions. In fact, the less they know about your business, the better. I’ve actually tried this a couple of times and I got so annoyed at the silly solutions my friend proposed, my mind went into overdrive and I quickly figured out a way to solve the problem.

Break the boulder into little rocks

Break the project up into smaller pieces and tie the completion of each piece to a deadline and a reward.

Ignore something

Is there something on the project you can ignore for now, and still get most of the project finished? I find that a lot of times I procrastinate when I’m faced with a single business project task I’m unsure about. Just don’t continue to ignore the entire project.

More than half of the things I get caught up doing while researching a complex task aren’t all that effective or useful in the long run. It’s critical to learn what to ignore.

Rank the critical tasks

If necessary, prioritize your own business and client project tasks using some form of ranking system. Just list the tasks, in small enough chunks, on a piece of paper. Then, using numbers or letters, rank the tasks.

You need to accomplish the two highest ranked tasks immediately. If you find you’re having trouble finishing one or both of those tasks, you haven’t broken them down into small enough tasks. Try again.

When you’ve finished the two most important tasks, review the list. Either move tasks up in priority, or ignore them altogether. Often, it turns out that once you’ve completed the really important stuff, some of the tasks you thought were really important, really aren’t.

If you’re decision-challenged

If you’re having trouble deciding how to start setting priorities, have somebody else tell you where to start. And take a look at the descriptions of decision making tools in this essay at Virtual Salt. The essay is well-written, though a bit more than you might want to go through. Still, toward the middle and bottom of the page, the author, Robert Harris, provides some practical tools for making decisions.