How To Prioritize Your Creative Tasks 🎯

Trying to prioritize your tasks in a way that is going to get you the most momentum in your creative business can really be difficult sometimes. I'm actually at an Airbnb right now and on this wall I've got a whole slew of post it notes set up. I've mapped out my entire year and put together the content schedule for the next 90 days, as well as my objectives for the next 90 days. And I am just completely overwhelmed with which things I should do first. But what I've done is come up with something that I call the priority grid. And this is kind of my modification of something that I believe I heard on a channel called the Future. If you don't follow Chris do in the Future, you totally should. It's one of my favorite channels on YouTube. Really brilliant, really great stuff for creatives like yourself. I've set this up as a downloadable in the description below, so go check that out. It's not just the grid. What you're also getting is some bullet points on how to start setting some goals for this year, how I sort of generalize and put together all my tasks and priorities. And then you'll have a printout as well of this priority grid for you to check out and walk through this with me. So let's dig into it.

So having all this stuff mapped out, it just feels like, okay, where do I even start? So you'll see here that at the top I have the word easy, and then at the bottom I have the word difficult. Now on the far left you'll see the words less impact. And then on the far right you'll see the words more impact. So the thing that we're looking for here is what is going to be the easiest to execute but also have the most impact on your creative business. So when I'm putting this stuff together, obviously content, certain content is going to be easier for me to make. And so it would kind of fall under that easy but also impactful content. So how do we start to lay this out? So what I'll do even for the week, is just set up a list of things that I need to do and I will lay out the priority grid and just start to write them in. So maybe for that week I'll need to send out an email to somebody, right? But that email is going to have a big impact on my business that week because I'm setting up a podcast interview. So I'm gonna put that really at that top right corner where it's the most impactful but the easiest to do. And I'm gonna do that right away because I know that's really gonna move the needle this week. So that's a big priority for me. Now, the stuff that's really difficult to do and doesn't necessarily have much impact, it may sit at the bottom of your to do list for quite some time. And then usually after about two or three weeks, if it's still there at the bottom of my to do list, I'll just get rid of it completely because there's no use in having something there that's not really impacting my business. And this could be a really good way to just decide, like, okay, I don't have to get everything done, but these are things that I'd like to get done. And all the time I'll see things that are on my to do list that I didn't even need to worry about, but for some reason, I had made them a priority. And if you're like me, you'll totally get into this shiny object syndrome. You'll feel like something needs to get done, you'll feel, you'll go do it, and then a week and a half later you'll realize, actually, I don't even know why I did that because it was absolutely pointless. It made no sense for me to go make that video about that thing or to create this piece of art when I didn't need to do that, or to write this music or whatever for this thing when now I'm not even interested in that. So make sure that we're really starting to prioritize and think about things in this manner of most difficult, least impact to the least difficult, most impact. So, super simple idea. Go download the priority grid in the description below. Again, it'll be more than just the grid itself. You're going to have some layouts on how to think about starting to set your goals for this year as you're moving forward. You may be digging into your goals right now. You can go watch this video here. And this is me setting my goals last year. And the things that I was thinking about at that time, very similar to this year as well. So go check that video out and I'll see you over there.