MBA2165 Q&A Wednesday: There is so much I need to do. What do I do first?

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Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Helpful business advice every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Charles and Charles asks. I've been running my business for over four years now and it seems that every day that goes by I get more and more busy. The more I do, the busier I get. My question to you is how do I know what to do first? There's so much that I need to do. I get overwhelmed and often worry that I'm working on the wrong things in the wrong order. Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much Omar. Love the podcast Charles. Such a solid question from Charles today on Q and A Wednesday because all of us as busy entrepreneurs will face this challenge. There's always going to be a ton to do. There's always ideas that come up there's always tasks that we want to accomplish and cross off our to do list. It can be overwhelming. We're not really sure which one to do first, second, third. And I had to work through this myself. And I actually have some advice on this, something that has really helped me over the years, especially recently where I've really had to think deeply about this. So I'm going to share with you what has worked with me. I'm going to put you in a state of relief. Right. I'm going to relieve you of the burden of your to do list. I'm actually going to give you something to think about that's going to help you tremendously when it comes to knowing what to do first and know which order to tackle all those to dos all those tasks you feel are all up to you to complete, up to you to finish, to make happen. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Not that uncommon for people to feel overwhelmed as entrepreneurs. It's probably the most common thing people say is I got so much to do, so little time. I'm not sure if I'm working on the right things. What do I do? Well, let's start with some facts. Let's start with first principles, right? Things that we know for sure we need to agree to the fact that we all have a limited amount of time. We all have a limited amount of energy. This means there's only so much you can do every single day. You're either going to run out of time or energy or both. You can't get everything done. And, and by the way, there will always be something on your list. You'll always add something. As soon as your list starts to get light, you're gonna start adding stuff. That's just the nature of achievers. So let's just agree to the fact that one, you will have a limited amount of time and energy every day and you'll Never finish your list. That list will never end. So that leaves you with the question, if that's the case, what should I be working on? What are things I should always, always do or prioritize on my list? When you wake up in the morning and you're about to tackle your day, what are the things that should be done first? And here's the answer. It's actually quite simple. You need to tackle the things that make the most impact. You need to do the things that actually move the needle in your business, that actually make you money. And it's that simple, right? Because sales and revenue cures all things. With money, you can hire, you can delegate, you can build systems, you can automate with software. There's so much you can do, but it's not possible if you're not making revenue. So what is going to move your business forward is really your top priority. What's going to make the biggest impact? There's lots of things that can help you make sales. Some people say posting on Instagram is going to help me market, and then therefore, it's going to help me get sales, and then, then I'll be able to get some revenue. But is that the most impactful way to use your time to make the biggest amount of, of change in sales and revenue in your business? Probably not. So it shouldn't be on the top of your list. I'm not saying you don't do it, but maybe you get somebody else to do it and you focus on creating value. This is how you make an impact in your business. You create value. Whether you're creating a better product or a better marketing engine or a better lead magnet so you can get the right leads. These are the things that make the biggest impact, that actually move the needle, that actually get you closer to your goals. And if you're still unclear about how to know what things on your to do list make the biggest impact, see it as a dollar value. See it as, what are my $1 tasks, $10 tasks, $100 tasks, $10,000 tasks. What are the things that have the potential to bring me $10,000 by just doing this action? Let me give you an example. A $10,000 task for me in my business is working on a partnership with, with another creator. Whether I'm sponsoring their newsletter or we're going to do a webinar together, and I'm going to be able to present to their audience. By me doing that actual webinar and having that partnership, I can literally make $10,000 in sales. This is why this task to me is high impact. I need to do more of those types of tasks versus replying to somebody on Twitter in a conversation that might be interesting, but I can't correlate cash to it. I can't correlate a sale to it. Maybe down the line somebody who reads that might make a sale and if they do, it might be worth $10, $100. It's not worth $10,000 and therefore it doesn't get my top attention and energy. So I like to look at everything I'm doing and all the things that are on my to do list and say, hey, what are the things that are $10,000 tasks? These are the things I have to do, I have to do first. Okay, this is where my energy goes. After I finish all my $10,000 tasks, if I still have time and energy, I move on to the thousand dollar tasks. What are the things that will bring me $1,000 in? And then so on and so forth with $100 tasks. And to be honest with you, $10 tasks, $1 tasks I don't do, I get somebody on my team to do for me. I outsource it, I get a freelancer, I automate it with software. Or I just don't do them at all because they're just not worth my time. Even if it's going to make me a sale, may be worth $10, it's going to take me at least 30 minutes an hour to do my time is worth more than $10 an hour. My goal is really to do only $10,000 tasks for my business. I'm not there yet. I'm still doing 10,000 and $1,000 tasks. And sometimes I do a hundred dollar tasks which I need to start delegating. I heard two quotes that are quite similar from both Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Warren Buffett, which is widely known as one of the best investors of all time, says that his job really is to make three to four solid decisions for the entire year. If he makes these right decisions, it basically fuels his whole business. So this is basically for him. He doesn't have $10,000 tasks. He has hundred million dollar tasks, billion dollar tasks. And for him, their decisions, their strategy. Same thing with Jeff Bezos. He said something similar, but I think he said he makes one or two decisions a day. And that's really a good day for him when he makes one or two. Sol, one of the things you need to get in the practice of when you have a bunch of things to do is, hey, what are some of these things that I can just cut out completely? I'm not going to do anymore. Just they're not worth my time. And what are some things I can give to somebody else? Delegate. Often when you have a big task like a $10,000 task, it's going to require work from different areas in your business. Creative writing, marketing, sales, website design, bunch of stuff, right? And instead of you saying, I have to do them all, your job is not to do them all. Your job is to ensure that the $10,000 task gets done. How it gets done, who does it, that's up to you. You can be totally hands off. And your job is just to come up with a strategy of how you're going to pull off this task. For example, I run a lot of partner webinars where I run webinars for different audiences for our partners. Some of our integration partners, like Irana, a partner webinar for Constant Contact. My job is to collaborate with Constant Contact via email, close the deal, the partnership, make sure that we agree on a date and a topic. Once that's done, I hand it over to my team. My team helps me with the creative, all the marketing actually creates the webinar in my webinar ninja account, creates a landing page, information, all that kind of stuff, writes all the email copy that they can send over to Constant Contacts so they can invite their audience and I just show up to the webinar. Right? My job is to pull it off, to get this mission done. I'm the commander of the mission. But if you have a team, even if you just have a va, this person is there to help you complete the mission. They're your soldier. Go ahead and utilize them. These are the heroes of your business. These are the people that actually get it done. Because the truth of the matter is, if you want to move your business forward and have velocity, you can do it alone. You need to to scale with human capital, with people on your team. So Even with your $10,000 task, you're not only doing it, you're doing the management and the planning, and you're getting the execution done by somebody else or other people on your team.

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I'm telling you, once you start implementing this, where you say, what is the most impactful task I can do Today to move my business forward to bring in more sales and revenue and customers. You start to realize it's actually not that much stuff. You can pretty much ignore everything else. You can even ignore your inbox, right? You don't have to really answer emails. No one's going to die if you don't answer an email today and you skip a day or two or three, even a week, even two weeks. People go on holiday, right? Or be on social or post or stream something funny that you did at lunch. It doesn't really matter. It doesn't actually make the biggest impact in your business. I know this from experience. You don't need to be everywhere all the time. You don't need to be doing everything. You need to do the right things. Why is Jeff bezos not doing TikTok dances now? I'm not belittling people that use TikTok. I'm not belittling the platform. And I'm saying that obviously Jeff Bezos has built a multi billion dollar business and doesn't have to do it. But the point here is that he doesn't feel the need to do everything. His job is to lead. Just question. I'm just giving this radical example to just get you to question. Does those things I think I have to do really make a difference? Do I know for sure that those actions actually result in a sale, enough sales that it's worth my time to be on there for hours? Look back at when you actually made a lot of sales, when you made a lot of revenue, when you had a huge month. What are the things you actually did to make that happen? Re engineer that right, you know, reverse engineer that and figure out, oh, you'll probably realize it had nothing to do with the busy work you're probably putting yourself through. So start with the things that make the biggest impact. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. And thanks, Charles, for your question on Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me just like Charles over at Omar at 100- MBA-NET Also, if you love this podcast, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. If you leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. You'll win a free ride to one of our membership programs. One of our trainings, our latest one, our automated webinar challenge, retails for $500. Or you can win for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and listen in on Friday to see if you won't. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcasts. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Because we have a limited amount of time and energy, it's even more important for us to recognize, hey, I can't give out my gold every day and use it to pay for things that are not worth gold. Your time, you can't get it back. Whatever day it is right now for you, that day will be gone and never will show its face, right? You'll never get to see it again. It's over. So this is worth more than gold. But let's say it's gold. You're paying for gold and then you're giving up gold to do what with that gold? Things that don't actually move the needle. This is why it's so important for you to evaluate and look at your list and say, okay, I have a limited amount of time. I got to make sure that whatever I spend my time on gets me a return on investment for my time, which is invaluable. Right? Is super, super valuable and I can't get that time back. So let me at least get a return on that investment of time in the best and biggest way possible. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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