How to Find Your Real Business Priorities
Here’s a quick story about priorities. I had a client, let’s call him Eric, who was in charge of marketing at a large ecommerce company.
I took part in weekly marketing meetings, where people proposed ideas, discussed current projects, and talked about problems that needed to be solved.
Early on Eric would run the meetings himself, sharing his screen, and would decide on which topics to discuss. As time went by, he had other people write up the agenda for him, and started taking the meeting while driving to the office.
There are a couple ways to look at this. From one perspective it’s being industrious and efficient. Let someone else spend time making the agenda. Maybe the meetings wouldn’t happen at all if they didn’t happen in his car. While some people listen to This Week’s Top 40 on the radio, he’s being productive, holding a meeting.
The other perspective isn’t so kind. People show their real priorities by how they spend their time and attention. If the guy in charge of marketing can’t put aside an hour each week to be at his desk for the marketing meeting, that’s telling us something important about his priorities.
When he can’t see anything being presented in the meeting, and we’re interrupted for his Starbucks order, it sends a message that this isn’t something he takes seriously. Why should anyone involved care more than he does?
Wait, I do this too?
It’s easy to judge this sort of behavior and it deserves to be judged. But at the same time it’s worth doing a self-audit of our own “car meetings.”
What is it, as business owners, that we say is important to do, but then gets put on the back burner? Or done in a procedural way, going through the motions just to check it off the list, without accomplishing anything?
Action-Based Questions to Find Your Real Priorities
If your projects or progress is stuck, but there’s not a clear reason why, knowing what your “car meetings” are can be the missing piece to understanding what’s going on.
How do you find them? Look at the behavior, not the words:
- The first thing you do = priority
- What’s left until the end of the day = not priority
- Thing that gets your full attention, even if you had a prior commitment = priority
- Thing that’s jammed in around other items or “multitasked” with partial attention = not priority
- What you work on today, even if you didn’t plan for it = priority
- What will be done “tomorrow” (that always seems one more day away) = not priority
- When an obstacle arises, you redouble your efforts = priority
- When an obstacle arises, you falter and make excuses = not priority
This filter does not rely on how I “feel” about anything. Words, perceptions, and internal reactions have no bearing on answering the question of whether I’m prioritizing something. Nor does it matter if what I’m doing is difficult or easy, impressive or contemptible, or if I enjoy it or not.
Look at the actions. They will tell you everything about the real priorities.