How to prioritize goals

Hi there! Today, we are talking about prioritization, what to do when you don't know where to start; when you have too many things on your plate and you just want to be able to focus on the very limited number of tasks and goals, but you're just too overwhelmed, confused and don't know what to do. One of the clients in our October Sprint mentioned that he's struggling with prioritization. And I thought, okay, this is a good question. I think a lot of people struggle with it and also I felt like I didn't really on this topic well enough during our weekly call. So, I wanted to take some time to kind of think about it, compose my thoughts on the topic and share it, first of all for him, but also for other listeners. as well. You need to get all your tasks to- do, items, and goals out of your head onto the paper or onto a computer file, or notes file in your phone. The reason why is that our brain is not really designed to store a lot of information. It's designed to process it, to create new connections, to be creative, but as a storage system is not very ideal. When we forced ourselves to memorize a lot of information, we feel overwhelmed and we feel like there is too much to do, and as a result we get stressed out. I know for me personally, when I don't write things down and I try to memorize it in my head, I get so stressed out. But when I write it down on a piece of paper, all the things that I was stressing about, it's like 10 items that can be done in like five hours. It's not really worth the drama and all of that emotional burden, that comes as a result of trying to store it in our head. Under Agile Scrum, there is this concept as Backlog, and I've done episodes about backlog, so go back and listen to them. But basically, throughout the sprint, any time you think of something, you write it down in your backlog. I advise my clients and I also do it myself. I record it in the notes document on my phone, which is also synced to my computer, I'm sure all the smartphones have this feature nowadays. It's just a simple text file. It doesn't have to be prioritized yet. It's just a place where you dump all of your crazy ideas. You don't have to analyze them, you don't have to create a definition of done yet. So, how it works is that you go on the walk, maybe you walk your dog and a thought comes up that, 'Oh, maybe I should order something like a new toy for my dog'. You can record it in there or maybe it's some revolutionary idea for your business or for your work. You can also record it there, but the habit that you want to establish is that the moment a to-do item comes up, you have an easily accessible place where you can just write it down a sentence, maybe a few words. And so Under Scrum, there are some ceremonies that you do such as print planning where you actually go through your backlog and review all of these items and then you decide what to do. As I mentioned in my backlog episode, the beauty of having a backlog and having this habit of first recording a to-do item and then acting on it and not the opposite where a thought comes up and then you start acting on it. The beauty of it is this space between having them thought and then acting on it, is very beneficial. As you will notice, If you do this process, when you do the sprint planning session which happens only once a month, where you actually pick the goals for the upcoming sprint, you look at your list and you are like, what was I thinking when I was writing these items? This is irrelevant. This is stupid. bad. This doesn't make any sense. This is just too much for the season of life. I shouldn't even think about this. I should focus on that. So, all of a sudden, half of the things that you thought were important when you gave these tasks sometime to actually rest on this backlog list. Then, they become irrelevant, and then you can delete half of them. That's the number one benefit of backlog. It saves your enormous amount of time if you are not reactive, when you actually pick the things that you want to do based on some sort of analysis and reflection and not just because a thought popped into your head when you were walking your dog. Okay? Also with the backlog, a lot of the things, even though they might still be relevant, but they lose their sense of urgency and priority. So when a thought comes into your head that, 'Oh, I have to do this'. It seems very urgent and important, but if you give it some time before you actually commit to doing it, then you're like, Mm, yeah, it's nice, but it's not as urgent. It can wait or word like, if I think about it strategically, it's better if I do task B first and then do this task. Again, backlog kind of removes a lot of the drama and stress from reducing the urgency and this false importance on a lot of the tasks. If you are just starting out with the backlog, what I recommend is you take a few days to clear out all the items from your head and into your backlog. I recommend going on long walks or bike rides where you don't listen to podcasts or music. Just just go in silence and think. The main purpose is to clear out everything out of you head. All the things that you ever wanted to do and you kind of keep rehearsing them in your head, or all the things around the house that you wanted to buy or fix or improve; everything, work, home, relationships, travels, all the things. We want your head to be as clear as possible. When you put it on your backlog list, it doesn't have to be prioritized. It doesn't have to be pretty, It just needs to be written in a way where you understand what the goal or the task is. If you just decide to sit down and write everything in one go, it'll not work. Believe me, I've tried. there, There are always some leftover ideas that come to you when you are doing dishes two hours later or when you are driving and you see a road sign that reminds you of something. Definitely, take few days to kind of record everything. And then when you have everything recorded in your backlog, then you can go through the sprint planning process, what we teach within the monthly methods and what a lot of the Scrum teams do in tech companies. you Look at your backlog and calculate your sprint capacity. I've done an episode on it. In very simple terms, it means that you look at your upcoming calendar and at all the commitments that you already have, then evaluate how much time you realistic have with all your appointments, with all the travel, with all the work deadlines and everything. How much time do you have to work on your personal goals? Pick the goals according to the sprint capacity. It's very limited number of goals and you lock them in. and you Just focus on this very small number of tasks for the upcoming sprint. Under the monthly method, it's three weeks, so lock yourself, commit to this number of goals, then get them done. Then review what you've done, what feedback you received from the real world and how you can adjust it, and then you pick another set of goals and you continue. So the idea is that you don't do long-term planning. You do short-term planning. You pick the goals for the upcoming sprint, which is very short, and you get them done. Then select the next number of goals. You don't do it like a year in advance. No. You get your goals done. Then you look at what happened to your life at any improvements or the opposite. Some of the goals didn't really give you the results that you were looking for. Then you're like, okay, now it's time to pivot. Maybe change something and then you commit to the next set of goals. I've done another episode on the benefits of short-term planning over long-term planning, why most of the tech companies choose to go this way instead of the traditional waterfall approach where you create these comprehensive plans, strategic plans, five years in advance and then none of them work of course, because, you know, real life happens. Go listen to that episode it's also very useful in your personal life. So Basically, you pick the goals for the sprint. Now the question is how do I pick? Which goal? Of course, if you're struggling with prioritization, you're saying, okay, I have a hundred items in my backlog and I only have, let's say 15 hours of free time that I can spend on my personal goals. How do I choose, let's say five goals out of a hundred goals? My answer, is to be honest, it doesn't really matter which goals you choose. Of course, there are some obvious questions that you can use to kind of like maybe eliminate the list too, let's say 50 instead of a hundred and those questions are what will matter five years from now? What will I regret at not doing? What causes the most pain or annoyance in my life? So, this is actually my favorite. I don't know somehow it kind of helps me to see the most painful item. I get a lot of motivation to do things that avoid that kind of save me the pain and annoyance. What will bring the most profit? Let's say, you have a business and you're deciding which way you want to go. You can always focus on monetary return. What will bring the most clients? You know, kind of like these obvious questions. If none of this work, you can always just simply take two goals at a time and just compare the two at random order and see which one will be more impactful on your life in five years from now. Then do a round of peers again between the winners, and that kind of help as well. So just look at goals two at a time and then choose the most important out of the two. Somehow, it's much easier for our brain to choose between the two options than to choose 10 out of 50. But as I said before, let's say you, picked 20 goals out of a hundred that are really important, but then there are still too many goals, and then the question is, which ones should they focus on? As I mentioned earlier, my honest answer is that it doesn't really matter. And here's why. You can start from any goal on the list. And by getting this goal completed, you create the skills, the mindset, the strategies that will complete in the next goal, 20% easier. Then when you complete the second goal, you kind of improve on the skills that you've developed, completed in the first goal, and then completing in the third goal will be, let's say, 35% easier. So, you are never actually working just on one goal. You are always creating strategic byproducts. That's the term that I learned from Brooke Castillo, and I love this term. Whenever you are working on something, you are creating strategic byproducts and those are the habits. Maybe some mind tricks or self talk that you have with yourself when you're facing resistance. It might be the journal in practice that you developed from achieving this one goal and all these strategic byproducts affect everything else. Let's say you want to start a new business, right? You kind of create a list of things that you need to get done, and then once you start working on these tasks, you realize that, okay, you know what, I would probably be more successful if I at least have a daily to-do list. So, you start practicing the to-do list management or maybe you've done to-do list before and you say, Okay, this is a bit more complicated. I think time boxing or time blocking, another term for time boxing, is what really needs to happen here if I want to be successful at this goal. When you start doing time blocking and getting more discipline in following your schedule, then you're like, Okay, you know what? In order to achieve my business goals, in order to be in a good mood in a good mental state, I should probably get enough rest. I should probably have healthy meals throughout the day. So you start scheduling your meal time and then you're like, Okay, in order for me not to eat junk food, in order to be productive at my work, again, we are still focusing on just one goal, which is your business goal, but you realize that in order to achieve that, you need to have healthy meals. But in order to have healthy meals, you have to go to grocery store, and then you start planning it in your calendar. Then all of a sudden, by the end of the sprint, not only did you achieve your business goal But you've also realized that you've been eating healthier, that you always have fresh produce in your fridge, that you have enough time to rest, and all of the strategic byproducts came from focusing on your business goal, your healthy eating was not even a part of your business goal, but by focusing on being in a good mental state, by being sharp, by being disciplined. You needed to have all these other things, you started working on them as well. You've learned the principles of time blocking. You've shown up for your time blogs and you got it done and then the next sprint, when it's time to work on your other goal, you already have this habit in place and you don't have to spend energy on fighting with yourself or trying to establish this new habit. It's already in place and the next goal is just that much easier. That's why I think it doesn't really matter where you start and which goals you pick for your first sprint because the strategic byproducts that you get from moving those goals from to-do to in-progress, to-done will allow you to build strategies, skills, and mindset that will help you with the second sprint. We are obsessed about the order of things so much, where most of the time it's irrelevant unless you are an architect or building a house . Where it is really important to build the plumbing before you put the drywalls in. That's why it's important, but in other areas of our life, it's not merely as important what you do first. It's like, so do I work on my exercise habit or do I work on my healthy eating? Honestly, it doesn't matter if you do this one this month and the next one next month. A good way to look at it is to ask yourself in five years from now, will it really matter if I achieved this goal in November 2022 or January 2023? It will not matter as long as you get it done. It's really not worth obsessing over the order of things as long as we pick worthwhile goals each month, 1, 2, 3. You decide how many goals you want to focus on based on your unique life situation and your schedule and your availability. so These are the tactical ways to address the problem of prioritization. But if we were to look at the real reason why people are struggling with prioritization, in my opinion, it's not really so much about the 'how of goal setting'. It's more about the fear of making their own decision. The fear of choosing and sticking to a very limited number of goals. Fears of disappointing people if you don't choose the goal that they want you to work on. I think it's almost always the question of fear when people ask me about, how to deal with confusion or prioritization. So let's talk about fear. Fear of choosing, and sticking to a limited number of goals or fear of choosing the wrong goal to focus on. I've talked about it just now. It doesn't really matter which goal you choose. Also, like think about it, we are talking about the goals that are connected to your self-improvement, to your personal goals. It's not like the goals where you can choose something wrong. It's like, do I want to get fit or do I want to get another master's degree? Both of them are amazing goals and like there is no wrong goal. You can pick one of these goals and you'll become better. When you are choosing personal goals, and self-improvement goals, I don't think that you can go wrong. Just pick one and go with it till it's done, then pick another one. Another way to look at the fear of making the wrong decision and that's where Agile comes into place. Under Agile, you only commit to a goal for one sprint and you choose the duration of one sprint. In our case, it's three weeks. So you commit to a goal for three weeks. And then after three weeks or up, you review, you do use sprint for respective, and you say, Okay, did it work? What was the result? Is it something that I expected? Is it worth doing in the future? You always have the freedom to say, no, it's not worth doing. I've tried so many hobbies in this journey of applying Agile. We've done horseback riding where me and my husband, we committed to horseback riding lessons just for fun. After the sprint or two were done, I kind of reviewed this goal and I say, 'You know what, I don't really enjoy it as much as I thought I would but my husband did enjoy it'. It's like he will probably continue his lessons and I am not as skilled at horseback riding. I can say that in the future, horseback riding is probably not the goal that I want to. . We also did some other stuff as a couple, and some of them worked, some of them didn't. The beauty of Agile is that after every sprint, you have full freedom to say, you know what? I thought it would be fun. I thought it would be, impactful, enjoyable. , beneficial for me, but once I engaged in this activity, once I followed through and saw the results, I don't think that it was worth my time. It's not for me. It didn't bring me the results that I hoped for. So I will change this goal. So I think if you are afraid of making your own decision, again, I don't think that it's such a thing, but okay, let's name it a wrong decision. You can always get this feedback loop very quickly. Three weeks, like think about it, three weeks. It's such a short duration of time. And like, okay, you've spent three weeks of your life on achieving a goal. You've created strategic byproducts. You've developed new habits, but yes, the goal didn't work out. So what? You only spent three weeks. Then you sat down, you've reviewed, and then you've decided to focus on something else. I think there's nothing wrong with that. So, even if you make the wrong decision, and I'm doing air quotes here, it's not gonna be for long. It's only gonna be for one sprint, and then you get to make another decision. Another thing that you need to understand is, there are very obvious benefits to being confused or unsure about prioritization. It allows you to do nothing. It gives you full permission to sit still and not do difficult things. Our brains are amazing at creating all the excuses and explanations and strategies to conserve energy and not do. It will always come up with some sort of story about why we shouldn't do difficult things. Confusion is the default story for many of us. For some people, it's another story, but for many of us it's confusion. If we've done it before and it worked, our brain will remember it and it'll do it every time. It'll do it on the big level things such as, what should I do in life? It will also have the story of confusion on a daily life. Like every day, you will wake up and you say, Okay, I'm confused. Yes, I have a to-do list maybe, but I'm confused about where to start first, is it number two? Is it number one? Where do I start? Do I go to the gym first or do I work? And my answer is, it doesn't really matter as long as you get something done and start somewhere and then go from there. So if we don't really pay attention to the benefits of confusion, it'll sip into every area of our life. When we'll go to a restaurant, all of a sudden we'll get confused on what to order from the menu. If you go shopping for a new dress, we'll get confused. If you're picking colors for our walls, we'll get confused. And so the more we allow the confusion to win and our brain will kind of always try to push it, the more it will expand into all the areas of our lives. This thought personally, scares me. I try to kind of zip it in the very beginning when I catch it, because I know that if my brain like this lizard brain, a very archaic part of our brain, if it learns that confusion, is a very valuable tool for me to just sit, still, watch Netflix and do nothing. It'll create Hollywood style storyline about why I'm confused, and it'll get better and better and better every time. Again, in the long term, the order of things, where we start, what we do first doesn't really matter as long as everything gets done or the most important things gets done or 60% of the things get done. But confusion and how some people call it lack of prioritization is a good excuse not to get anything done. So I think my answer here is yes, there are tactical ways to prioritize things and help with it. Most of the prioritization doesn't really matter as long as it gets done at some point. Doesn't really matter if it gets done this month or three months from now.. We shouldn't really obsess over every single item. And when it gets done, we are creating strategic byproducts by committing to any goal and seeing it being completed. It doesn't really matter which goal you pick as long as you get it done. It'll create the habits and the strategies that will allow you to get the next goal done faster. If you're still feeling confused from following the suggestions of backlog, sprint planning, all of that, then we were talking about the emotions and mainly the fear. It doesn't really matter the tactics. The tactics of time management's sprint planning. This is irrelevant. You need to look at the fear of making your own decision and actually kind of talk with yourself and see if it's justified. I'm sure it's not. In my opinion, the question of confusion and not knowing where to start comes from fear, unjustified fear. Okay? So, that was a very long answer to the question of, 'What to do when I don't know?, Which items I should prioritize? This was the question from one of my clients, and if you have a question and you want me to give such a long and detailed answer, you can always email me and I'm more than happy to answer the question, especially if it's something that I haven't talked about before and if I think that a lot of people struggle with the same question. So yeah, definitely feel free to email me. You can do it through the website. All the links are in the podcast notes. Check it out. If you want to sign up for the upcoming sprint, the link is in the show notes. It's monthly method.com/enroll. We are starting November Sprint very soon, and we have a new sprint every month. So, if you've missed November sprint, make sure that you sign up for December Sprint. Okay? That's it for now and have a fantastic week, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.