Dan Martell - March 13, 2017


How To Prioritize a Task List Using Focus Filters™

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Spheric Stewie
How To Talk To A Mentor Without Feeling Nervous The Six Reasons Companies Fail

Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

210.72

Word count

1,552

Sentence count

85

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

If you feel like you have a list of 100,000 things to do and you don t know where to start or you ve got some big projects to kick off but you don't know which ones you should do in what order, or you're just trying to get your team on the same page because you're frustrated with the fact that they're always working on the wrong things, this episode is for you.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 It's like, if you have multiple businesses it tells me you don't
00:00:02.500 trust your ability to execute in one so you have a backup plan.
00:00:06.040 Backup plans don't work in business.
00:00:15.120 How to prioritize your projects.
00:00:17.160 Here's the deal.
00:00:18.280 If you feel like you've got a list of 100,000 things to do and
00:00:21.320 you don't know where to start or you feel like you've got some
00:00:23.960 big projects to kick off but you don't know which ones you should
00:00:26.720 do in what order or if you're just trying to get your team
00:00:30.160 on the same page because you're frustrated with the fact
00:00:32.460 that they're always working on the wrong things,
00:00:34.360 that's what I want to cover in this video.
00:00:36.000 You know, I really think that if you build the framework
00:00:39.460 that I'm gonna teach you, your team can actually
00:00:42.160 self-prioritize, that is the nirvana.
00:00:44.740 Having people that they can make their own list
00:00:47.600 and not only that, they can then reprioritize it
00:00:49.540 based on the strategy that you give them
00:00:51.640 so that you know they're working on the right things.
00:00:54.040 That is the opportunity.
00:00:56.340 You know, I really learned this lesson
00:00:58.440 working with one of my earlier kind of,
00:01:01.240 I mean, to call him a mentor is kind of,
00:01:03.620 it wouldn't be doing him justice.
00:01:05.140 The guy's name was Stu, and I was building my company,
00:01:07.660 Spheric, and two years into it,
00:01:09.120 after kind of going through a near-death experience,
00:01:12.520 I asked myself, like, has what I built
00:01:16.120 actually been, like, awesome,
00:01:18.060 or is it just a normal business?
00:01:19.940 Like, do I have something incredible,
00:01:22.260 because I thought it was incredible, 0.97
00:01:23.640 like, is this a sacred cow or is it just a frigging cow? 0.75
00:01:26.480 So I brought this guy, Stewie, and I remember he was, 0.94
00:01:29.220 I called him my gray hair even though he had no hair.
00:01:32.240 He used to run a very big telco company.
00:01:35.160 I mean, I got introduced through friends of a friend's
00:01:37.420 and the guy was retired and I convinced him
00:01:39.720 to come work with me in my business to really just see
00:01:42.960 if there was opportunity there. 0.51
00:01:44.360 And I've never met somebody with so much frigging energy.
00:01:47.360 I mean, it was like, it was, you couldn't, 0.82
00:01:51.040 He would literally work 24-7 if there was a need to.
00:01:55.220 Like it was a big deal to like stop working at 10 p.m.
00:01:58.480 if he was on a roll.
00:02:00.140 And one of the first exercises that he did with me
00:02:02.220 was ask me to make a list.
00:02:03.920 He said, Dan, I want you to make a list of all the things
00:02:05.880 that you know you should be working on,
00:02:07.120 or ideas or strategies, whatever, just make the list.
00:02:09.220 And I was like, all right, and I sat there for like 20 minutes
00:02:11.320 and made the list, and then he came back and he goes,
00:02:13.120 all right, what's the top priority?
00:02:15.700 What should you work on?
00:02:17.300 And I'm looking at my list and I'm like, well, I don't know.
00:02:20.800 this one's probably really important because if I do this
00:02:23.140 and it does this.
00:02:24.260 And he goes, that's cool.
00:02:25.580 And he goes, here's what you need to understand
00:02:27.500 is you have a list of strategies and projects and action items.
00:02:31.340 He said, you could have three different entrepreneurs
00:02:33.380 have this exact same list of good ideas
00:02:36.320 because this is what entrepreneurs do every day.
00:02:37.780 That's what you're doing.
00:02:38.880 And you can have two entrepreneurs execute the list
00:02:42.260 in a different order and their business fails in three years.
00:02:46.200 Or you have the other one and he executes it in the right order
00:02:49.400 and his business thrives.
00:02:51.640 Same list, same good ideas.
00:02:54.100 One of them's done in the right order,
00:02:55.800 the other one's done in a different order.
00:02:57.240 Stu taught me the concept of right action at the right time.
00:03:00.480 A lot of entrepreneurs have strategies.
00:03:01.920 They're like, Dan, should I do this?
00:03:03.340 It's like, I don't know.
00:03:04.780 I need the context.
00:03:05.920 I need to understand what resources you have.
00:03:07.720 What's the management bandwidth?
00:03:08.720 There's a lot of questions to be asked
00:03:10.320 and that's why I do more private client coaching.
00:03:13.060 But Stu taught me that if you wanted to figure out
00:03:15.760 the right way to do it, there is a strategy.
00:03:17.960 and this is what he shared with me
00:03:18.960 and I wanna share with you guys.
00:03:20.620 The first one was, he said, okay,
00:03:22.500 go through and mark anything that makes you money.
00:03:26.540 Like directly if you do this, it's gonna make you money.
00:03:29.540 So I put, you know, make money.
00:03:31.440 So it's like, boom, you have like different symbols.
00:03:33.440 Whatever you wanna do, I'll teach you a more advanced
00:03:35.540 strategy at the end to just get through this quicker.
00:03:37.520 But number one, does it make you money?
00:03:40.340 If you take advantage of that strategy, that action item,
00:03:43.320 is it gonna generate dollars in the door, okay?
00:03:46.280 Most businesses fail because they run out of money,
00:03:48.980 cash flow, whatever it is.
00:03:50.760 So step one, prioritize based on things that make you money.
00:03:53.960 So just, he said, make a little note.
00:03:55.420 What things would make you money?
00:03:56.700 Number two, he said, what are the things
00:03:59.400 that would make a customer happy, okay?
00:04:01.920 So it could be improving your process,
00:04:03.500 improving your onboarding experience,
00:04:04.800 your customer service.
00:04:06.200 I mean, a little, even like if you have a retail store,
00:04:08.560 the smell in the bathroom sounds crazy,
00:04:10.940 but it's been proven that it will increase your revenue.
00:04:14.700 I mean, anything that you know would make,
00:04:16.800 maybe it's adding a new feature to the product,
00:04:19.140 maybe it's adding a new incentive or whatever it is,
00:04:24.040 but it makes the customer happy.
00:04:26.520 That's number two, that's your fill.
00:04:27.720 This is like go through the list and write those down.
00:04:29.820 So I'm like writing them down.
00:04:31.760 So I'm going through, and then he goes,
00:04:33.780 now look through the rest of the item,
00:04:36.080 or all the items again, so it's like makes money,
00:04:38.660 makes customer happy, so just like note those.
00:04:41.000 Then he said, anything that is a repeatable system,
00:04:44.840 meaning that you're gonna do this over and over
00:04:47.700 as the business grows, and it's worthwhile
00:04:51.420 to create a system around, or an operating procedure,
00:04:54.720 how to do that thing.
00:04:56.420 So if one of my action items was
00:04:58.280 build Facebook marketing strategy,
00:05:00.480 then if that's something that I know I'll be always doing,
00:05:03.320 then start that, or put a little note next to it
00:05:06.360 that says create a system, okay?
00:05:09.060 And then, this was the cool part.
00:05:11.360 He said, now that you have all of these items,
00:05:14.400 these projects, actions, to-dos,
00:05:16.460 and you have them marked which ones make money,
00:05:19.940 number two, make the customer happy,
00:05:21.540 or three, allows you to create systems,
00:05:24.380 he said, then rank order them.
00:05:26.080 Like, go through and rank order which ones have all three.
00:05:29.680 And my nerdy math brain's like, all right,
00:05:32.080 well, here's what I'm gonna do.
00:05:33.380 I'm gonna create a scoring system.
00:05:34.960 So I'm like, if it's make money, it's a three.
00:05:37.920 If it makes a customer happy, it's a two.
00:05:40.260 And if it's a system that I could create ongoing,
00:05:43.760 it's a one, right?
00:05:44.800 And then if you put them in a spreadsheet,
00:05:46.100 essentially you calculate the totals.
00:05:48.000 Now some things aren't any of those.
00:05:49.900 They're a zero, right?
00:05:51.560 But if you prioritize and sort in that order,
00:05:53.960 all of a sudden, you and what I had is a list of priorities
00:05:58.840 based on if I took this action,
00:06:01.080 it would improve my business and move it forward.
00:06:03.520 And to me, that is what you do every day.
00:06:06.940 It's what you expect your team to do every day.
00:06:08.940 It's what you would love for them to come up with yourself,
00:06:11.440 but you've never taught them how to do that.
00:06:14.540 So that is my strategy for you.
00:06:16.140 And my challenge to you is actually to sit down
00:06:18.140 and teach your team this process of makes money,
00:06:21.240 makes customer happy, and is a repeatable system.
00:06:23.740 Because when Stu taught me that,
00:06:26.140 it literally took like 100 items on my to-do list
00:06:29.340 and really narrowed it down to the top 20.
00:06:31.340 These are the 20 things that really matter.
00:06:33.340 You know what, the rest of it,
00:06:34.640 Maybe someday, I get there later.
00:06:36.380 But it was right time and right action.
00:06:39.180 So that is my challenge for you in this video is to make that
00:06:42.180 list of all projects, actions, to-dos and prioritize them
00:06:45.680 based on this strategy.
00:06:47.260 I call the framework the focus filters.
00:06:49.680 There's only three.
00:06:50.880 You score them two, three, two and one, right?
00:06:54.100 Makes money, customer happy, end system.
00:06:56.620 And then you can rank order.
00:06:57.600 If you want to go all pro, you can do it in a spreadsheet and
00:07:00.300 that'll save you a lot of time.
00:07:01.840 So I hope this video finds you incredibly well.
00:07:04.640 And as for usual, I challenge you to live a bigger life
00:07:06.920 and a bigger business and we'll see you next Monday.
00:07:08.720 Cheers.
00:07:09.540 If you like this video, be sure to subscribe to my channel.
00:07:12.120 I'd also invite you to join my newsletter
00:07:14.360 where I share exclusive invites to events
00:07:16.720 and other free training material.
00:07:18.120 And if you're ready to get going,
00:07:19.120 I got a couple videos queued up.
00:07:20.660 I'll see you next week.