4 Steps to Balance Multiple Roles (& How to Prioritize Your Work on a Small Team)

When you're working in a small team of, say, less than 100 people, you're going to find yourself in a position where a lot of the time you're going to have to be balancing multiple roles. You might be living one day as a public relations officer, another day as the head of marketing, and another day as the chief sales explorer. And every so often you're going to find yourself needing to create brand new hats based on the needs of the business. This was supposed to be a pirate hat. But when you are balancing all of these hats in your business, it can become a little bit of a challenge to figure out which hat is most important at any given time. Is it the marketing hat, the PR hat, the sales hat, the other hat, which is the hat that you need to be most worried about in any given day of time? Day of time, any given time, or any given day. When you have so many things that you can do, it's hard to know where to put your focus. And that can result in feeling a little bit of overwhelm or bit of feeling confused and finding yourself just kind of procrastina planning. Meaning you're stuck, you're paralyzed by all the possibilities that you're not able to take action on any of the things you need to do. In this video, we're going to take all these hats that you wear and clean them up, organize them, chunk them into bite sized little containers so you can find that sense of balance between all the things you need to do by following four simple steps. Now before we get into all of that stuff, I want to just introduce myself here. If you're new on the channel. Hello, my name is Laila. I am a consultant, works with small teams to help you guys kind of systemize and streamline your operations. And that starts on this day to day personal level of finding that focus and clarity on what you need to do. So if you're interested in this topic, like subscribe and check out the descriptions for some fun bonuses about how you can learn a little bit more about this topic. So with that, let's start off with number one. Now depending on the types of roles you have, this might already be set for you. Constraints are typically things I like to think of in real measurable units such as hours, days, times. I don't know, feelings might not be so good, but you could probably work it in. What we want to do is define for ourselves what is the box that we are working in? How much space do we have to organize? So if we are talking about your work Day. Let's say your workday is eight hours. We want to set that from the onset so we know what boundaries we have and what space we have to fill with all those shiny tasks that we might need to do. Okay, so first thing first, step one in this process is identify your constraints. If you are working for a company that has defined your work hours, perfect, you're good. But if you are balancing roles that might be off hours or flexible hours, please humor me here and define what working hours for yourself, almost as if it were set by that company or whatever it is. Maybe you're a child care provider, maybe you're a stay at home parent. Set your hours for that, which I know might just be whatever hours the kiddos are awake. Let's define those here. As an example of what this might look like, I could say, okay, for My job at ProcessDriven, my constraint is eight hours per day. That's what I want my normal workday to be. Or my constraint could be I want to only work 40 hours per week. That could be a constraint. Define the constraint for yourself. And then we're going to move on to step two. Ready? Yeah. Okay, let's move on. Once we've defined our constraint, our box that we have to fill, we want to figure out what's the most important thing that we need to do and what's the least important thing we need to do. What I would suggest here is to build what I'll call a hierarchy of priorities. Okay, this priority hierarchy, Bing, is a list where you can identify the most important and the least important things that you do in this area of your life. Whether that's your whole life or again, just your work life. Whatever you're looking to organize, let's identify those priorities. For a real example here, here's how I've kind of gone about doing it for my own roles here at ProcessDriven and my company. So here you can see I have a chart with most important and least important. And this is going to be where I'm going to add my hierarchy of responsibilities or things. I over here to the right, I have all of the hats I currently wear as the CEO of ProcessDriven. I yes, I am the CEO, but I'm also the business owner slash CFO. I'm the product lead. I'm the content creator. Despite having a team of 10, I am still wearing four different hats and I'm still working in four different roles. So to practice this hierarchy of prioritization, my chart looks something like this. I basically have four Layers to keep track of the most important and least important things that I do at this current season in my business. So let me show you what those are. At the very top, I have things that are related to integrity. Anything that fulfills a promise that we have made or is essential to achieving our mission. Vision values, that kind of stuff that is top of my list. What this includes is things like I promise something to a client. If I make that promise, that is my word, that is my reputation, I need to do that. That is a matter of integrity. If I promise to do this, that and the other for an external stakeholder or YouTube sponsor, I have to do that. That's a matter of integrity. If we have a situation that comes up that requires decision making, and decision making is one of our core values to decide to decide that comes up, I need to do that. So that's what that first category is for me. Anything that falls under that category is the top of my to do list, always. The second category I have on here in terms of importance is things related to abdication. So for me, big priority for me right now is making sure I am not the limiting factor to process driven growth. I'm not the one getting in the way of you guys getting the content you need or clients in the process driven membership getting the support they want. I don't want to be the bottleneck. And so abdication is the second priority for me in this season. Anything I can do to get me out of the weeds, even if I don't feel like doing it, that is my second thing on my to do list. So this might be, you know, hiring people who have the skill sets to take things off my plate. This might be creating SOPs. In certain seasons of my business, that was not at all priority. And this season it is. The third level for me is offense. This is what I call it at least. This is stuff that is related to the growth of the business, generating revenue, generating lasting value, entity value. That's my third tier right now. And below that is defense. This is like the opposite of offense. This is where we include operations, sustainability, that kind of stuff. These four things are four categories. I can look at anything on my potential to do list and see where it falls. This gives me a sense of priority by saying, okay, if it's an integrity thing, top of the list. If it's defense, bottom of the list. And these categories have come to be based on who else I have on my team. Because for other people, defense is top of their list and offense is bottom. And so on and it also changes based on the season of the business. When my business was just getting started on offense was number one by far. Integrity, number two, abdication, bottom of the list. It just wasn't a priority. And as we've kind of moved into this current stage, the priorities have shifted. For every role you have, for every team you're on or are building, these categories are going to be different at different moments, at different times, with different people around you. If you are the only person in your organization or on your team, you're probably going to have things a little different than what I have here. But this is just one tool that's going to set us up for steps three and four to help us start taking action. But before I go though, I want to give one more example of what this might look like for, let's just say a more traditional multi role, which would be something like this. Here's another example of kind of that priority hierarchy thing. And here we have somebody who's wearing two hats instead of four. They work customer support and they're also a social media engagement person who maybe does some social selling. Those are two very different hats, but in many teams they're staffed by the same person. For this person at the very top of their hierarchy is csat. So what is their customer satisfaction score? That is the most important thing to them based on their priorities and what they've agreed upon with their team or manager. Because of that, anything that influences customer happiness, that key metric that they're looking at, they're going to care about and they want to make sure that's the top of their list. By the way, if you don't know what I mean by key metric, watch this video up here where we break key metric KPI, that kind of good stuff down. Next up we have sales. Anything that generates revenue is the second priority for this person. Granted that could be many different things. Ad hoc tasks, routines, all sorts of stuff. But anything in that salesy sphere is number two on this person's list. Below that we have things like goodwill, things that deepen relationships and discovery, things that grow our audience. Based on the colors, you might be able to see how these kind of break out to being every other for the two roles this person has. Unfortunately, that is the downside of having multiple hats. You're always going to have to have a trade off. You might think generating revenue and CSAT should be just as important and in an ideal world they would be. But until we can afford to have two people each dedicated to one metric, we Kind of need to choose our favorites in any moment in time. So this is what prioritization chart might look like for someone in these two roles. Now, before we move on to number three, I would just suggest that you pause here for a second, grab a piece of paper, virtual or otherwise, and kind of think about what this would be for you. If you're organizing your work life as a leader or business owner, you might have a chart more similar to mine here. If you're an employee, you're probably going to see a chart more similar to this one here. But either way, I'd love for you to try to break up your work into, let's say, three to five categories that you can easily say. These are the levels of priority. In general, you know, yes, there might be a fire, maybe things need to shake up here and there. But in general, what's your prioritization if you want to go outside of work? If you're including personal life in here, be sure to include that as well. Probably towards the top. But for now, for focus just on the workplace. Break down those three to five different levels of priority once you're ready to go, unpause this video and we're going to move on. Okay. All right, so now that we've set a constraint and we've defined our general priorities, we're going to look back at the work that we know we need to do and start putting it in an order. What we're trying to establish here is a short list. That's our goal. We want to create a short list of the top five or less tasks that we know we need to work on in order of importance. So just to show you what that looks like here, I'm going to pop inside Monday.com, which is a task management work management software. And in this area, I've just been brain dumping tasks I need to do, you know, listen to a podcast, go get my what do I need to do? What else? Feed the dogs. That's a task as well. Answer emails, those kinds of things. I've got all these tasks on here, and what I want to do is start thinking about my priorities based on that chart that we created before and think, okay, my very top priority right now is integrity. So what do I have that reflects that number one priority that I need to put on my shortlist? So. So here I'm just looking which of these reflects a promise that I have made? Well, to me, responding to messages, that's a bit of an integrity call in the sense that I don't want people to be ghosted if I'm the person responsible for that. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to say not started and identify this as a task I want to work on. What else? Feeding the dogs, that seems like something that should definitely be on there because letting your. Your pets be malnourished, that seems a little unfair. Answer emails. Unfortunately, if I don't have anyone else on my team who can help with this in this imaginary world, yes, I think that's something I need to do. Taking out the trash, optional groceries, optional, so on. So that is my number one priority right now, which is again, that integrity box. I pulled three tasks that meet that categorization and identify them here to go onto my shortlist. I'm going to actually call this view over here shortlist. And here I can see in a kanban the three tasks that I've selected. I'm going to go back to the main table where everything's at and think if there's anything else that applies to my second category of prioritization. In this case, let's say my second category as it was in the example was delegation. Getting things off of my plate. Well, on this thing, maybe let's just say boss life, reading that book, maybe I viewed that as the essential, essential step I need to figure out how to get out of my own way. And if so, I'm going to go ahead and put that on. Not started. And maybe there's a few others. Maybe for some reason planning the launch I need to do because that is going to give me the revenue in order to hire that person I want, maybe that podcast is also going to feed into this. And all of a sudden I started to identify all the tasks that fall into those first few categories. And what do you know? I've achieved six achieved. I've identified six tasks for my shortlist. I have these all showing over here on a kanban to help me focus down so that I don't really have to worry about these empty ones and I can track my progress through each category. But now that I've added these here, we found that we are over the limit of five tasks on this shortlist. In fact, our shortlist is not so short. It has six things on it. This is where we need to start to have things compete. That very first category is as is. We added in everything and we didn't have overflow. But when we added that second category of bottlenecks, we started to get a whole bunch of work in here. That started to flood us up. So I need to get rid of some things. And this is where I'm going to decide. If I had to choose just five of these six items here, what would I say is the least impactful, the least exciting, the least important of these, of all of this stuff here, I'm actually going to say planning that launch is probably the least important because maybe that's something is just a pie in the sky idea. And so for now, I'm going to kick that one back. Now, once we've defined this to do list of 5 tasks in our shortlist, or, you know, about half a day's work, whichever one is smaller for you. What I want to remind you of is that we are going to lock in this shortlist. We are not going to change it, we are not going to add more tasks to it. We're not going to change our mind and swap things out. Once it's set, it is set. And now we get to focus on step four. By taking all of our tasks and shortening them down to this short list, we give ourselves a sense of focus. And we're locking this down for the next time period. Whether we're doing this daily or weekly, it's up to you. But we are not going to touch this short list until that cadence arrives. So it's the next day or the next week or we finished everything. Only then do we get to go back and shop. For which five new ideas do we want to work on? This is kind of giving us this chunking mechanism of picking our favorites, focusing on them, and then going back and repeating. And if you have a bit of a challenge, sorting through ideas for this initial stage, if you want to go a bit deeper on this topic, I do have a video up at the top where I talk about the Eisenhower Matrix, which is one way to help you go a little bit more into the nitty gritty on this step of the process. Okay, finally, we have arrived at Act 4. Step 4 of the process is do the work hard truth time here. Eventually you have to actually do the things you're organizing. As fun as it is to organize, you don't actually get anything done that way. So to get out of that procrastiplanning phase, we're going to put all of our stuff on that shortlist. And this phase of the process is about action and finding the most efficient way to get things done for you. And I say for you, because what works for me is probably not going to work for you. And finding that personal flow is is a huge journey of self discovery. I actually have a video on it up here talking about the idea of productivity. If you need some tips in this category, but what I'll say is generally speaking, the best way to get these five top things done is to not so much worry about that role conversation we had at the beginning. You know you have content creator role and CEO role and product lead role if you have these different roles you're wearing. Generally speaking, grouping things by role like say Wednesday is CEO day and Friday is product day. For most people, that doesn't prove to be the most helpful method. Or at least for me, it doesn't prove to be the most helpful method. Instead of thinking by role, which is kind of an arbitrary construct, think about type of work. So high creativity, low creativity, high energy, low energy, high willpower, low willpower and try to give yourself a nice variety pack on every given workday. One thing that I really like to do is to think about having low energy and high energy days kind of broken out in half. So if I have a bunch of meetings, which for me is pretty high energy but very low creativity, I will try to pair that with a very high creativity, low energy kind of thing. So such as brainstorming or planning or budgeting, as weird as that sounds, trying to find ways to plan your work and your pacing around what is the most important unit for me. For me it's energy. Introvert. Limited factor is always my energy. For you it might be focus, willpower, figure out what you need to prioritize and start chipping away at those five things at a balance that works for your mind, your personality, and your kind of team environment. Obviously we don't want to be selfish jerks here saying I'm selfish. Sorry, I need to wait until my content creation day on Monday before I can give you that answer. We don't need to go that far, but there is a balancing act we can have of taking care of ourselves, making sure we're being really, really effective with our time so we're not going against the grain while also being responsive to other people. Earlier on I already gave the example about meetings and creativity and trying to pair those things together to make a more productive day for me. Another thing I've found that works well for me personally is to think about work that does really well in large chunks and break them up by work that goes really well in small chunks. So for example, YouTube filming super creative, super high energy. I like to do it in a large chunk, blog off a whole afternoon just for that. But on either side of this, I like to work on really easy, boring administrative things that I don't want to do because it's a nice palate cleanser in some ways between them. So for me, that might be things like email or bookkeeping or, you know, that kind of fun stuff. And I like to have those as bookends of short chunks of annoying work and big chunks of fun, creative work to play to the strengths at any given moment of the day, find what works for you. And again, I have those videos that I linked above if you want to go into more detail on this particular step. This is the important one though. Get your butt in the chair, do the work you need to do, and listen to yourself. If you find yourself facing too much resistance. Once we are in this step four, it is time for us to go back and repeat it. Yes, this whole process, this whole approach to your work is meant to be repeated. Steps one and two that we this way, one and two that we talked about can be repeated every, let's just say every month or every quarter as your priorities and seasons of your life change. As I've said, what you will find to be the top priority in one season of life is going to be totally different when summer vacation comes around or that newborn is born or whatever the heck else changes in life. Keep that in mind for number three and number four, meaning defining your short list and actually doing that short list. I would recommend most people focus on this on a daily cadence. That means every day you plan your top five things for the next day. Repeat it at the end of every day. If you're someone who, who maybe is a little bit more whimsical, maybe you find yourself day to day being a little bit too many options. You get overwhelmed by the planning. This is taking more than just five minutes a day. It's taking 50 minutes a day. That's not good. In that case, I would consider looking at weekly instead. That can also work. Take a week, plan your top five, work on those five, and if you finish the list, cool, plan more. But that's generally the cadence I would look at on both of these. Either monthly, quarterly on 1 and 2, daily, weekly on 3 and 4. The last thing I'll say is if you are an employee in multiple roles, this would be a fantastic conversation to bring to your direct supervisor, your manager, your coach, whoever that is, bring this to them and say, this is what I think my top five priorities are. Is this what you think they are? Is this the right order? Fantastic way to ensure you are working towards alignment on your career goals and also responsibilities that you carry. If, however, you are self employed, if you are self sufficient, if you are otherwise in your own orbit without a direct manager to guide you on this, one reminder I'll put for you is to look towards your I want to say manager, but your co workers in life, whether that is co workers in your business or co workers in your family. Co workers is a weird word. Your colleagues, I don't know, I'm thinking spouses, kids, family members, friends. Find people who are around your level, who are around your life and say hey, this is what I've identified as like the priorities of my life. Does that match how you see me living my life? It can be really interesting to see from the outside in, particularly if you've made this hierarchy chart and this prioritization matrix about your whole life, including family, spirituality, whatever it is that is important to you and you bring that to say your spouse and say hey, is this, does this match your understanding of me? Just like a manager can help an employee find that sense of alignment, often bringing this to a friend or a partner could be a nice way to get a reality check on where you might be putting on a little bit of rose colored glasses around what you say your priorities are versus how you're currently living your life. So just food for thought there and a way to take this exercise a bit further either in your career or in your personal life. Now I know this video was a whole lot. We covered a whole lot of ground here and if you are someone wearing multiple hats in multiple roles, you already have a whole lot on your plate. So if you found this video interesting, save yourself some time next week, build a little system here with me and go down below this video and join our email list. Because that way you get notified when our next video comes out. Yes, of course. Like and subscribe all that stuff. Secret you may not realize is even if you like and subscribe you YouTube will still not necessarily show you every video we have. I know, weird right? So if you would like to be the first to know about our newest releases, check out that email link below this video and sign up to save yourself a little bit of time next Friday when we release our next video. Thank you guys so much for joining me today. If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below. Until next time, please remember, enjoy the process.