How do you handle the overwhelming amount of things to do?

If you run a business there will always be more things to do after you finished those “1,000,000 things”. So you first shouldn't work too many hours on any given day and second you need to prioritise the things that directly pushes your business forward (thus not backwards). Proposed order of things (I adhere to):

1. fix bugs that affect the majority (>75%) of the users
2. sales (direct chat / email / follow-ups)
3. working on marketing (blogposts, helpful comments on website, material for the website)
4. Fix bugs that effect a few users
5. Working on the product (new features, update features, etc.)

The tools/apps are unimportant here, anyone that can create a list for you works (including pen and paper).

I switch ALL my tasks priorities every day (using Trello), based on:

• Critical or important bugs
• People on intercom complaining or asking things
• Clients asking for adjustments / features
• Features roadmap

To prioritize tasks you have to take into account:
1- What is the cost of finishing the task? 1 hour? 1 day? 3 days?
2- What are the benefits?:

• How it affects the adoption of your product? this affects all new users
• How it affects the user experience? multiplied by the number of users impacted

but yes, it's always hard to know if you are working on the right thing or not.

priority example

I try and use Trello to track everything. If I wake up in the night with an idea, or if I'm doing something else and think of for instance a security concern that I need to double check to ensure we are covered. Or anything for that matter that needs to be done or checked.

I just create a ticket in Trello for it. Set the priority/tag (thought, potential feature, low, medium, critical, on-going/monitoring), and move it up or down the backlog (or appropriate list) depending on how important I think it is.

It has skyrocketed my productivity honestly over the past 3 weeks or so. Can't recommend it enough.

Unless your app is down, it's almost impossible to know for certain what the most important thing to focus on right now is. It's therefore critical to not spend too much time second guessing yourself. Instead of trying to figure out the most important thing, find a candidate most important thing and just do it. Then another. You'll get way further doing 365 "maybe most important things" in a year than trying to organize everything perfectly.

I'd recommend also that unless you need to keep track of thousands of things as part of your work, switch from a task-oriented system to a goal-setting system. One of the taglines of my app (https://complice.co) is "Turn your to-do list into a today list" - and Complice literally has a today list to keep you moving forward rather than stuck in organizing mode.

Hi @Zencentric,

I've had the same problem before, prioritization.

The problem with just making a priority-sorted list of tasks is that the list is still very, very long. It feels like you have years worth of work staring you in the face.

With that many options, it's easy to start second guessing your priorities and switching from task to task, never getting anything accomplished.

The only thing that worked for me was taking a page from Warren Buffett's book (read here https://jamesclear.com/buffett-focus ).

What I did was cut down to the top priorities and (try to) ignore the rest.

The power of focus is incredible and it helped me make huge strides once I started doing it.

Trello is for small projects. Start with a wbs, work break down structure. By breaking down large inititives into small tasks. Then use a ticket system to manage the priority scrub. This can be viewed in a gantt chart dynamically. I use Redmine, its free. https://www.redmine.org

Break down and cry :D

Im using Airtable to stock and 'evaluate' regulary the tasks that will have more impact on my business.
Also, I guess focusing on one task at the time is essential if you want to achieve it correctly,

Hey,

I've had the same story here. I started to cut off the activities which pushed me to a bad filling, just focused on what really matters. That was the way to get some type of calm :)

The thing that has helped me most is not a tool like Trello or Notion, however, just writing down the 3-5 most important things for me to do and just do them. I try my best to not get sidetracked by side tasks. Ideally you would break everything up in to small details such as: "Finish last paragraph on blog post", "Design new blog card component" and not "Design blog".

It's taken a lot of time to really refine my process and trust in it but its working. I previously put all my tasks in Notion but things never got finished as sub tasks popped up and it was incredibly demotivating. Focusing on the 3-5 most important tasks - no matter how small - has helped me the most. Making progress on tasks and gaining momentum is an incredibly powerful thing so just pick something to help you get that momentum.

I'd say, it depends what these things are and how critical they are to move the business forward. I think out of strictly necessity the most pertinent things will always bubble their way to the top. I don't have insight into what the tasks are, but as much as possible I like to outsource these tasks, and have 2 awesome assistants from Upwork who are able to handle a lot of the tedious tasks for me. Depending on the week I am paying roughly $50-$200 for their help.