top of page

How to Prioritize When You Have Too Many Things On Your Plate



Owning a business, balancing your work and home life, honestly even just working in this society today is stressful. It’s hard to prioritize what’s important, because as success-driven individuals it’s scary to feel like you could turn away opportunities that could drive your career forward. We’ve decided to help you all and share some of our best advice and tips for learning how to prioritize when you have too many things on your plate at once.

Get started early

One of the best things you can do for yourself if you’re struggling to manage your time and work is to get started as soon as possible on new projects. This way, when unplanned emergencies or new projects get thrown your way (which they always do) you’ll be ahead of the game and have less work to do than if you just put it off until the last minute.

Getting an early start on projects is also a great way to gauge how long they’ll take you to complete as well as whether or not you need help or assistance from other employees or more information from clients or businesses.

What’s time sensitive?

Deciding to prioritize your work based on what deadlines or expectations are coming up the quickest is definitely important. You want to ensure that you’re meeting deadlines, but also making sure that you have the time and manpower to actually complete the work to your satisfaction.

When it comes to having multiple projects with similar deadlines, or taking on projects that you feel are unattainable in a specified time frame, it’s important to communicate. Let your client or your boss know that what they’re expecting is unrealistic or something that you can’t take on at that moment. It’s important to make sure that you have a solid reasoning behind your request, but it’s also important that your client or boss understands what’s realistic and what isn’t. If you are constantly overworking yourself for your business or for someone else’s, then it leads to negative feelings, becoming unloyal to you and your company and a chip in the relationship.

One thing at a time

We get it. Some people literally can’t focus on just one thing at a time. However, it is something that can help you prioritize your workload a little better. If you’re someone that struggles with only prioritizing one thing at a time, then you can try scheduling your day in blocks. Each block is dedicated to a different project or different task. This way you can manage to work on multiple projects throughout the day while paying attention to one task or project at a time. It also allows you the opportunity to chip away at different projects or different tasks and manage them more efficiently than just giving your entire day to one single project. However, it’s still important to take into consideration timelines and due dates– this way you don’t miss a single deadline and you can alleviate your stress a little more.

On the other hand, if you have meetings or dates pre-arranged with people, whether it’s clients or co-workers, to work on specific projects, you also have to take that into consideration. You have to ensure that you’ve done your preparation beforehand so you can be confident in what you’re bringing to the meeting, but also that you have time free in the days following to re-visit the project or task and complete it. This gets especially tricky if you have multiple businesses or are struggling to find people to help you out.

Hiring a virtual assistant or outsourcing some of your work is a great option if you’re able to afford it. You can hand off the more tedious tasks or find someone that specializes in digital marketing and social media management and pay them to manage your social media accounts for a couple of months. This just takes some of the workloads off of you so that you can focus on what’s more important at that time. Whether that means securing clients by being able to schedule more meetings during the day, or spending more time at the night with your family at home. No one is going to judge you or criticize you if you seek help and get the support that you need so that you can become the most successful version of yourself.

Comments


Want to become a VA?
Want to hire a VA?
bottom of page