Page 111 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

short- to-medium-term goals, and the outer sphere is those long-term goals that you strategise towards. Time management is achieving your daily goals while at the same time working with your everyday life, such as meetings.
It all starts with a to-do list and writing things down. The illustration shows tasks and priorities on the left-hand side, which is also your to-do list. On the right-hand side you have clean sheets where you just write notes down (meeting notes or everyday notes). People who have been around me long enough know that I’m always writing things down. I went to a short seminar last night which had some business people speaking, and I noticed I was the only one writing notes down. I was getting fuel for this book. But if I didn’t write those notes down, I would forget them. Again, it all fits into time management.
In the to-do list, write all the things you need to do for that day or further out (it doesn’t have to be that day). It could be working in with 90- day goals or longer-term goals. However, the tasks of today are little bites in that journey.
Now, the key thing here is to prioritise. This is best done the day before, as is the list. When you wake up and wonder, ‘What do I do now?’, if you’ve already done a list of things to do, you can go to that list and see clearly what things you need to knock off that day – the high priority ones.
To prioritise, go through your list and prioritise using As, Bs and Cs in the margin – obviously A being the highest priority and C being a low priority. But one day the C may become a high priority, or it may drop off. The Bs and Cs will often be the nice things that you want to do. Then you prioritise the As in numerical order (e.g. A1, A2, A3, ...), so that something that desperately needs to be done first is A1. Only prioritise the As numerically, not the Bs and Cs. Work on achieving the As first, starting with the A1s. Work on the rest of the As before the Bs and Cs.