Why you can't prioritize your work

A common cause of anxiety in people doing productive work is asking yourself the question at the start of a project or a block of focus time that you have protected. Am I doing the right thing? And the first bit of advice that I want to give you about that is If you are doing something, keep going. The important thing to do is just start and you will literally figure it out along the way. I'll tell you more about why that is in just a few minutes. In this video, I'm going to give you 2 and a half ways of prioritizing your work and projects for maximum effectiveness and experience. Hi, my name is Matt Ragland and I help you be more creative and productive through simple systems that build lifelong habits for for success. The simplest way I have found to prioritize your work comes from author Michael Hyatt. In his book Free to Focus, Hyatt talks about the difference between uphill and downhill work. And to me, this is such a good visual for how you can categorize the types of tasks that you're doing. Is it something that is pushing you uphill towards your summit of success? Or is it something that is kind of downhill, kind of easy? You're still getting things done, but you know, you know, when you're doing it, this isn't bringing me any closer to the type of work that I want to do, to the type of person that I want to be. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't do some of those downhill work tasks, but I would work really hard to block out time to batch all those tasks together so you can maximize your distraction-free, focused productivity time to work on that uphill task. Now, I mentioned there were 2 and a half ways of prioritizing your work, and so Often people ask, well, how do I know what is uphill work and what is downhill work? An easy way to think about this is my friend Kay Hee's 10K work matrix. And it's basically, you know, 4 quadrants of skill versus leverage and thinking about the $10,000 work is something that is really high skill, really high leverage. You have 10K work, things that only you can do, and then $1,000 work, $100 work, $10 work. The tasks that you would think are pretty high skill, pretty high leverage for you, that $1,000 to $10,000 an hour type of effort, those are your uphill work tasks and everything else. You really need to think about how you can batch those together so they don't take up too much of your creative or focused energy. Or if you have the means for it, think about how you can hire a VA that you can delegate those downhill work tasks to. Now I have a more analytical way of looking at task or project prioritization, and that comes from my time working in growth marketing at startups. And it's this concept of the ICE score. Now I have reworked this to call it the VET score, but the ICE score is originally where I got it from. The VET score acronym stands for value, ease, and time. And basically what you're doing is ranking each project that you're thinking about based on what is the value that it brings, what is the ease of it for me, and how much time is it going to take. And I do want to make a quick distinction that you shouldn't think that ease and time are closely correlated because anyone who's done data entry type of work or maybe answering some types of support tickets, You know that things that are easy for you may still be very time-consuming. And that's another area of looking at, okay, maybe this is a $10 type of work, $100 type of work, downhill type of tasks. Okay, so that stands for value, ease, and time. So what you're going to do is create a grid and list your project ideas, and then on a scale of 1 to 10, what is the value, ease, and time for each of these project ideas? When you're done with that, you're going to add those 3 numbers up and divide them by 3. Whichever project has the highest VET score, that is the one that you should focus your energy on in your next project sprint, or even just for the next week or 2 of tasks that you have available for you. I could ask myself, what is the VET score of doing a video versus an email newsletter or a long-form essay that I'm writing? It probably is still going to be the video because the value of me posting something on Twitter is so much higher than the value of me posting something on my website just based on the traffic that each one gets. I also want to give you a quick heads up if you're watching this too far in the future. I have another video that you can watch. Just click on the card up here that talks a lot about eliminating distractions, resisting and recovering from them. So that you can spend more time in your distraction-free focus zone, really working on those high priority, high leverage tasks. So once you're done watching this video, make sure you also watch the Distraction Recover Resist video as well. Okay. All right. So now we get to the deeper question of not just how do I prioritize and make sure that I'm doing the right thing? Because I've given you a few methods for doing that. Michael Hyatt's Uphill Downhill Work, Kay Hee's 10K Work Matrix, and the VET score. Here's the question that so many people ask, even at this point when I'm doing personal coaching with them, they will still say, how do I know how valuable something is? How can I assign like a $1,000 or $10,000 work label to this thing that I'm doing? How do I even know what is uphill versus downhill? I'm totally honest and serious about this. You just have to get started doing the work so that you can start to understand what is the value of something. How easy is it for you to do? How long is it going to take with that time score? You won't know until you start doing it. And that is a hard thing for a lot of people to wrap their mind around. I believe the experience that you've already built through your lifetime will give you a good gut instinct that you should trust at the beginning of this. And the longer that you do it, the more that you make intentional decisions about what you want to work on and just reviewing, understanding, looking back and saying like, oh, I thought that was going to be really easy. It turned out it was kind of hard. So next time when you go to rank a project like that and be like, oh, this thing, I thought it was easy last time. I gave it like a 2 in the ease. In fact, it's actually more like a 5. So thinking about the more that you make these decisions, the more that you commit yourself, even in like small sprints, to ranking things, to prioritizing and seeing where you're right, where you're wrong. It's something that Sonke Ahrens talks about in his book, How to Take Smart Notes. This little passage actually doesn't have anything to do with note-taking, but it's about how to build expertise. I'm paraphrasing, but he says the way that one becomes an expert is through experience. And over time, you build so much experience making intentional decisions and learning from the results that everything that you do starts to become intuition. And so at this point, for a lot of the work that I do, I can just kind of know through instinct, through intuition, what should be prioritized or what shouldn't be. I know what is uphill and downhill work. I don't have to spend much time thinking about it because I've been doing this intentionally for several years now. And this is a thing anyone can learn. So if you are looking at it and saying, this is kind of tough to do, it's going to take time, then I would say, yes, it is going to take time. But also it is time that all of us have. These are all decisions and priorities that we're going to set or have set for us. So we might as well make intentional choices about what matters the most to us and learn from the results. I'll leave you on this video with one of my favorite quotes from Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism. And he simply says, if you don't prioritize your life, someone else will. So I hope you take that to heart over the next several days and weeks as you are working on the priorities and the projects that matter the most to you. We're getting pretty close at the time of this filming, the end of the year and starting a new year. And so as you're watching this video, just think, What do I want to prioritize for myself at the beginning of the new year? What do I want to make my intention for the new year coming up? These are really good, important questions to ask yourself because if you don't set them for yourself, I guarantee someone else will. Thanks so much for watching this video. I'll see you next time. Bye.