How can you effectively prioritize without having the clarity you need to have?

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. The idea that I wanted to put out there and share with you today is this: far too often, I see in the work that I do with authors, thought leaders, speakers, academics, etc., that they’ve got things a little bit backwards.

And what do I mean by this? What I mean by this is that they’re constantly trying to prioritize a lot of stuff. They’ve got so much to do; they’ve got travel, they’ve got research, they’ve got writing, they’ve got client service. There’s a long list of things, and they struggle with how to prioritize that, how to make the most of their time, how to get done the things that need to get done.

To me, it seems fairly obvious that you cannot effectively prioritize all the tactics, all the stuff that you need to do, the things that you need to get done unless you have clarity. If you have clarity, then it becomes really, really easy to say, ‘Ah, this is what I’m trying to achieve. These are my strategic objectives. These are my goals. This is what I want to accomplish over Q1 of next year or over the next two years, whatever the case may be.’

And therefore, by prioritizing A over B, is that going to get me closer to that objective or pull me away from that objective? Is it something that is opportunistic that I should reprioritize, or is it something that is just fun and interesting and doesn’t fit into my goals and objectives?

So, my counsel, my thoughts, my experience has been: until you have clarity, you cannot effectively prioritize all of the things that you’d like to do, need to do, want to do. Love to hear how you think about this. Thank you.