Pennant designed by Scott Naauao and printed by Oxford Pennant.

There are always numerous things vying for our attention. The problem is figuring out how to deal with all of them. Use this technique to help you prioritize and not feel so overwhelmed.

1. Write a list of all the problems you have for your sales and marketing on post-it notes (e.g. not enough foot traffic, product X isn’t meeting sales goals, low engagement on social media platforms). 1 problem per 1 post-it note. Try to be as complete as possible.

2. On a whiteboard, draw out 4 quadrants with the following axis:
Vertical Axis: “easy” to “hard”
Horizontal Axis: “would be nice to fix” to “critical to you business”

3. Put your problem post-its in the quadrants based on how you would rate them based on those scales.

4. Prioritize them as follows.

Upper Left: This is your top priority. If you have any post-its in this box. Address them now so you don’t have to worry about them.

Upper Right: These are long term initiatives. Important, but difficult to address. You should be spending at least half of you non-day-to-day-operations time working on solutions for these.

Lower Left: These may not be make a huge impact, but could be some quick wins for your company. Delegate it to one of your staff or freelance it out if it won’t cost too much.

Lower Right: These aren’t really worth your time. Take them off your list of things to worry about, so you can focus on the other three. If they grow into bigger things later, then you can reassess. But for the moment, don’t worry about them.