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One, two, three, four.

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Welcome to the Systemized Business. Here we dive into strategic productivity to help you overcome entrepreneurial overwhelm. I am BK and I do not believe that you have to be a slave to your business. You can streamline both your business and your life with simple systems. So, whether you're a female entrepreneur navigating the fast-paced world of business, this podcast is your go-to resource for simplifying processes, optimizing efficiency and achieving more with less stress. Let's get started on building the systems that will take you from overwhelmed to in control. Hi there, friends, welcome back to the podcast.

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You know the saying practice makes perfect. Well, this includes mastering your time. It doesn't come easily or naturally to some of us, so it takes practice and consistency, and the best way to ensure that we get done everything on our list is by prioritizing the most important tasks and doing those first, and these prioritization skills come with practice. It may not always be clear what exactly to do first. Some projects have steps, others are more general and can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but prioritizing your tasks is the best way to get the clarity that you need. So pick out the tasks that are most sure to move you forward and do those first. What you want to do is to ask yourself if I complete this task, will I be satisfied with what I have done? Consider the item that you would do if you could only choose one thing to do today. What task would move you closer to your goal in the time that you have? I know it can be difficult to know exactly where to start when it comes to prioritizing a to-do list full of important things, because our to-do lists are full of very important things.

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One tool that we can use is the Eisenhower matrix, and this is a powerful tool. It's simple but powerful, and it is based on you prioritizing tasks based on their urgency and importance. So here's how it works. Start by drawing a large square, divide it into four smaller squares, so you're creating a two by two grid. So now label the columns urgent on the one column and then not urgent on the other, and the rows you have important and then not important. So you have now four different quadrants.

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Quadrant number one, which is at the top left, is urgent and important. So you have now four different quadrants. Quadrant number one, which is at the top left, is urgent and important. Quadrant two, which is top right not urgent but important. Quadrant three, which is the bottom left urgent but not important. And then quadrant four, which is the bottom right not urgent and not important. Ok, so now that you have that, list your tasks, write all the tasks that you need to accomplish today or this week. Now you want to categorize those. Place each one into one of the four quadrants based on its urgency and importance, right? So now you're plugging things in into each quadrant what is important, what is urgent, what is not important but urgent, what is not important and not urgent. And so you're just plugging them in.

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Now what you have is your quadrant one has some tasks, your quadrant two, three and four. Okay, what do you do with these? In quadrant one, these are the ones that are both urgent and important. So this is where you want to focus on. Quadrant two these are important but they're not urgent, so you can schedule these tasks for later and then plan to work on them at another time. Okay, so that's the one and two done.

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Quadrant three now you have tasks that are urgent but not important, so let's delegate these. Someone else can handle these for you. And then quadrant four we've got tasks that are neither urgent nor important, so let's just eliminate those altogether. They do not need your attention. They do not need your attention. See how easy that was.

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Give that a try and see if you can take things off your to-do list, because not everything that you think is on your to-do list needs your attention immediately or at all. So you can use this matrix to regularly review your to-do list and to make sure that the tasks that you have on your list are correctly categorized. Correctly categorized, and it's okay to be flexible to move tasks between quadrants if their urgency or their importance changes. Something can have started off being in your urgent and important and then move over to not urgent but important. You see what I mean. But what you do is focus the time on. Focus your spending your time on important but not urgent tasks will help you reduce the urgent tasks in the future. Did you get that? Once you've eliminated, once you're done with quadrant one, the tasks that are most urgent and most important, then you can focus your time on quadrant two. The more time you spend on quadrant two tasks reduces quadrant one tasks in the long run. I hope you got that.

Speaker 1: 6:49

So now, now we want to streamline processes. For the day, you have made a list of everything you need to do. This list can cover your entire week if you want, but you can just stick to the day-to-day sections Now of your urgent and important tasks. Right your quadrant one tasks. Right Any deadlines or time constraints constraints that you have, because this further prioritizes these, getting really granular and really specific about when you need to start working on what.

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One thing that helps me get control of my day is to take a look at my list of to-dos the night before and visualize my day. I see myself doing the first task, finishing that task, moving on to the next, etc. It sounds a little woo but honestly, this works and it just reminds me, too, of this is the way athletes and pro athletes work. There's a lot of visualization that happens before they hit the track or before they hit the field, and this just gets their mind to be ready, right to connect with their body to execute the tasks. Yep.

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So set aside tasks that are unnecessary, that are not pertinent to what you're currently trying to get done. Remember, we're only really working with quadrant one and then quadrant two, so quadrant three and four these are tasks that we need to delegate, so they're off our plate. And then, you know, quadrant four things are those that are off our minds completely, and when you look at your the most important, the most urgent it's helpful to start with the most dreadful or the most difficult task first. Brian Tracy calls this eating the frog, and hear me out, this has nothing to do with amphibians, but it has everything to do with tackling your biggest, most important task first. If you first accomplish something that you don't want to do, you'll feel less burdened and more motivated to tackle the rest of your to-do list because you've gotten the most difficult thing out of the way. So you can do all of these to set your priorities straight, to take a step back, weigh the importance of each task according to the goals that you have in mind.

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And, of course, if this was a perfect world, everything would go just as planned. You know, just like we planned right. But there are bound to be distractions. New things can pop up, surprises can happen. You know, important phone calls can come in and call us out and really kind of mess up or derail our day, even though we can plan our day the night before there, when you do have time, when things have calmed down. So here we're stacking techniques, here we're taking advantage of our most productive hours the when and the how by doing the work that needs your most attention first. Okay, friends, that is it for this episode. Thank you for taking time to spend a few minutes with me on your walk or on your drive, or maybe you just need a company as you made dinner. I appreciate you listening. The time management series continues next week. I look forward to chatting with you then. Bye, for now, no-transcript.