How to Prioritise Tasks as a Business Owner When Everything Feels Urgent

Learning how to prioritise tasks as a business owner is crucial when everything seems urgent. It can sometimes feel like an emotional roller coaster – full of highs and lows. Often in those low periods, we can all feel like everything is urgent and high priority. This guide focuses on practical prioritisation techniques so you can get more done while feeling less stressed.

Let’s try and break down the sense of spinning plates. Firstly, it could be that you have enough plates but don’t know which ones to spin in what order. This feels more like a prioritisation issue. Another scenario is that you simply have far too many plates to keep spinning – that’s more about delegation.

How to Prioritise Tasks as a Business Owner: Effective Strategies

Too often in a small business, the things that shout the loudest get done first. That tends to be customers wanting attention, making complaints or chasing services. Then there are suppliers advising of late deliveries and finally staff members not turning up or making mistakes.

These loud demands typically revolve around day-to-day operations – what I call regular work. This is the work you routinely do for customers. There’s another category – special-effort work – which includes tasks like changing banks, moving offices, or recruiting staff. These activities don’t directly impact day-to-day operations but still need attention.

Yet I often see businesses make two critical mistakes with special-effort work:

• Trying to tackle too many special-effort tasks or projects simultaneously
• Not allocating the necessary time and resources to complete special-effort work properly

The following strategies for both regular and special-effort work will help you prioritise effectively.

Prioritising Regular Work

Day-to-day work is best prioritized through production or delivery schedules integrated into your internal processes. Obviously, you need such schedules and processes in place, otherwise everything feels like an emergency.

Consider implementing these approaches:

• Develop Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for your key internal regular work
• Create daily or weekly scorecards to monitor both the progress of your schedules and the effectiveness of your processes
• Track critical metrics like the proportion of orders dispatched on time and in full

Problems will always arise, so another useful tactic is to record all issues, rank the most important ones, and focus on fixing those first.

Advanced Task Prioritisation Techniques for Business Owners

You’ll likely have fewer special-effort projects, and they tend to be more obvious to identify. In my many years of leadership, I keep returning to three key principles for prioritising this type of work:

1. Limit your special-effort tasks or projects. Business leaders across companies of all sizes consistently overestimate what they can accomplish in a month, quarter, or year. Lower your ambitions to more realistic targets—perhaps 2-4 major projects annually.
2. Use a basic ranking system to narrow down to a realistic number of special-effort tasks. Categorize your tasks into four groups: ‘Now,’ ‘Not Yet,’ ‘Never,’ and ‘Maybe.’ Through several iterations, work to move potential tasks away from ‘Maybe’ into either ‘Not Yet’ or ‘Never,’ and shift tasks from ‘Now’ into ‘Not Yet.’ The end result should be a small set of well-considered ‘Now’ tasks. You can then rank these using a simple effort-versus-reward comparison, giving top priority to tasks offering the best rewards for the least effort.
3. Communicate priorities clearly to your team regarding the ‘Now’ special-effort tasks, and assign ownership to others besides yourself—which brings us to delegation.

An additional tip: Avoid excessive task-switching, as this significantly reduces productivity and increases the feeling of being overwhelmed.

The Art of Effective Delegation

Being able to delegate effectively means your company can thrive without you personally overseeing every detail. This freedom allows your business to grow without you becoming a bottleneck, while simultaneously improving your work-life balance as you spend less time fighting fires and answering routine questions. Best of all, your company becomes more valuable.

As the chart below illustrates, companies that can sustain a three-month absence of their owner are more than twice as likely to receive a premium acquisition offer compared to businesses unlikely to survive without the owner:

[Insert chart image here]

Delegation is clearly important, so why do so many small business owners struggle with it?

The challenge often stems from thinking about delegation in binary terms. Instead, consider delegation as having four degrees, each providing your employees with increasing levels of decision-making autonomy and authority.

The Four Degrees of Delegation

Here’s a summary of the four degrees of delegation (much more detail is available in the eBook, “The 4 Degrees of Delegation”):

1. Follow My Lead

The first degree involves trusting employees to follow your instructions. You create a Standard Operating Procedure and ask them to follow the steps you’ve outlined.

2. Research & Report

The second degree involves giving employees broader responsibility to research options for completing a project or task. You don’t have a predetermined solution, so you’d like your employee to analyze and present a shortlist of options. Importantly, with second-degree delegation, the final decision remains with you.

3. Do It and Report

The third degree extends decision-making authority to employees. You trust them to make decisions but want to stay informed to provide coaching if their decision-making raises concerns.

4. Do It

The fourth degree takes inspiration from Nike’s famous “Just Do It” campaign. This level applies when you completely trust an employee to handle something entirely independently.

By selecting the appropriate delegation level, creating Standard Operating Procedures, and establishing time or financial parameters for your employees, many of your projects and tasks can be successfully delegated. Despite your thoroughness in assigning tasks, employees may still encounter obstacles and need clear guidance.

The “Yes-able” Question Technique

This is where the “yes-able” question becomes invaluable. Instruct your employees that when they face a problem, they should resist the urge to simply drop it in your lap. Instead, they must research two or three possible solutions and present their recommendation in a question format that you can answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Finding Balance in Your Business

Life as a business owner, especially in a small business, can feel like a constant battle of spinning plates. The strategies I’ve suggested aim to reduce the number of plates that need spinning for you and your team—that’s prioritization. I’ve also outlined ways to reduce the number of plates you personally have to manage—that’s delegation.

By implementing these approaches, you can create a more manageable workload, reduce stress, and focus on the activities that genuinely move your business forward.