Whatever your goals online, be it growing your brand, launching a new product or just staying relevant, there’s a lot to do!
If you want to continue growing your audience, driving more traffic and increasing your sales you can’t afford to stand still. You have to push yourself.
Sounds easy when you say it like that, right?
Wrong!
How do you know which way to push? Here are the top 10 things from my personal to-do list (in no particular order)
- Create 5 Pinterest pins
- Write 2 new blog posts
- Update IG and Fb
- Study 1 hour of Portuguese
- Customise my Google Analytics reports page
- Write the next 2 newsletters
- Record the first 3 podcast episodes
- Read through all the latest URLs I saved in Evernote when last researching content
- Reply to 2 clients
- Record a tutorial video
Apart from the Portuguese, they’re all important to my business. They’ll all bring in results to some degree, so how do I know which direction to focus my energy?
I could do a little bit of each, but then nothing gets done.
I could start with the easy ones, but then that would leave a long hard slog at the end. Plus, by the time I get round to the hard ones my list will have grown again.
Or I could freeze up. Overwhelmed, I could just ignore them and do something I enjoy like playing the ukulele for a few hours.
Would that help? No.
Would it make me feel better? For an afternoon, maybe, but then the overwhelm would return and I’d just feel worse.
So what do you do?
Follow the 3-5 system
I can’t claim ownership of this one. This one comes from Dan Meredith and his amazing book, “How To Be F*cking Awesome“.
The basic summary is this:
- Dump every conceivable job out from your brain and into a spreadsheet – eeeevvvveeeerrryyyything!
- Take a break, come back to it later and add more.
- List absolutely everything that you could conceivably do if time was no issue.
- Once you have that monstrous list, assign each item a number, 1, 2 or 3.
- = Super important, money depends on it, only you can do this job and the deadline is fast approaching.
- = Important but there’s no impending deadline. You need to be involved, but others could complete it.
- = No deadline, not critical, anyone could do it.
- Be ruthless.
- Highlight all the 1s.
- In your Monday to Friday calendar put no less than three and no more than five 1s on each day.
- If you have time, sprinkle in a few 2s and a light dash of 3, but the priority is getting those 1s complete.
That’s it. 3 to 5 jobs per day.
If you only do 3 per day, by the end of the week that’s 15 mission-critical jobs you’ve completed. 15 jobs which will bring in more leads, more money, more traffic etc
You won’t feel overwhelmed because your week is already planned out and each day only has 3-5 jobs on it.
Is it that simple?
Yes. Yes, it is.
But what about all the other jobs? What about all the 2s and 3s?
Would your business grow and improve if you completed those tasks too? Absolutely.
That’s where a Virtual Assistant comes in.
A good VA can sit down with you at the start of the week, month or quarter. They’ll brainstorm that monster jobs list. The beauty of working alongside them is that you’ll be able to bounce ideas back and forward.
Once you have that list you divide it up. Maybe you only want to do a single job from the 1s per day. Maybe you want more time and freedom to do the fun 3s.
Once everyone’s on the same page and the jobs have been assigned then you’re free to focus on what’s important to you.
Do you want:
- Less stress?
- More time to do things you enjoy?
- The knowledge that your business is moving in the right direction?
Book a free 30-minute consultation call with us today and we can help you get started with that list.