How to Work Less and Earn More by Resetting Your Priorities

If you’re drowning in a torrent of customer emails and staff calls, you need a new strategy for handling demands. Welcome to the wonders of priority management.

Who owns your time? Your staff? Your customers? Whoever’s fire is blazing hottest?

It’s kind of a trick question because there’s only one answer: YOU.

You own your time.

If that simple fact comes as a shock, you’re probably ready to rein in the madness of dealing with constant urgencies that eat up every minute of endless days that leave you wondering where all the time went.

Interestingly, the issue isn’t actually about time. It’s about how you use it. And THAT is determined by your priorities.

Never having enough time is one of the most frequent complaints we hear from the contractors we work with. Implementing a thoughtful priority management system can flip the script on your schedule and get you back in the control seat of your time.

In this article, we’ll show you how to get started and share the powerful secret that will make your system stick.

What’s the difference between time management and priority management?

It’s important to distinguish between managing TIME and managing PRIORITIES, because they aren’t exactly the same thing.

• Time Management is about WHEN you’ll complete tasks.
• Priority Management is about WHAT tasks you’ll complete in the time you have.

It’s essential to get a handle on how you manage both your time and priorities, since the two are intricately linked.

Time is the ultimate differentiator in determining which leaders achieve success versus those who don’t. To avoid wasting precious hours, you’ve got to start by understanding what work most requires your attention. Then, you can fill your time accordingly.

Ian Price from Forest St Builders made some big moves to realign his priorities and use his time more effectively. His decisive actions helped him go from being a one-man show to tripling his revenues and quadrupling his team. Learn more in this video.

3 steps to set up a priority management system

Nobody, and we mean nobody, needs a solid priority management system more than a trades business owner. The demands on your attention are scattered in every direction and you’re dealing with fluctuations in both the physical and emotional realms, at the mercy of materials and people.

Everybody needs you – from office staff, to site crew, to customers, to subcontractors… and then there’s your family. Remember them? They really belong at the front of that list. (We’ll give you a tip on how to manage that later.)

For now, let’s start with a quick picture of how life could look once you calm the chaos:

• You’re guided by clear and attainable goals.
• You control your day, your day doesn’t control you.
• You have boundaries – and they’re respected!
• You make progress on things that have been on the backburner for years.
• You’re not flustered when a crisis hits ‘cause you have the mindspace to deal with it.
• You’re an inspiration to your entire team, and it raises everybody’s game.

If that all sounds appealing, let’s make it a reality.

Step 1. Make your to-do list

Jot down all the stuff you know you need to do. Whether that involves scribbling things off the top of your head, collecting all the sticky notes from around your office or pulling up the app you use for exactly this purpose (in which case, well done you!), it doesn’t matter.

Just get everything gathered in one place.

Step 2. Sort your tasks

This is without a doubt the most vital and difficult step in the process and where most contractors bung it up.

Rank the items in your to-do list to determine what ought to be getting your attention. There are a few ways to do this. You can use color coding. Or if you prefer a more militant approach, there’s the Eisenhower quadrant. We also recommend A, B, C categorization.

This is really the heart of priority management and we’ll cover the basics on the various methods in our free web class, The Contractor Focus Framework: How to block interruptions and carve out time for your top priorities. Space is limited, so register now!

Step 3. Set your schedule

Once you’ve identified your priority tasks, get them into your calendar by using block scheduling.

This technique involves taking your best guess at how long you’ll need to complete each task and “blocking” time in your calendar specifically for that item.

Again, whether you use a fancy digital planning app or you draw boxes on a wall calendar, your tool doesn’t matter. Just keep in mind the following:

• Don’t fill every minute, leave some free space in your calendar (10% is a good amount).
• Travel time should be scheduled separately, don’t let it eat into your free space.
• If a task will be quick (less than two minutes), just do it, don’t bother scheduling it.
• If you’re delegating a task but the handover will need some attention, schedule the time.

Prioritization Practice

Since prioritizing your to-do list can be tough, we’ve put together a little practice exercise.

Here’s a list of five tasks that need to get done. How would you arrange their priority?

🤔 Return a call from a subcontractor whose completion date needs to be pushed out.
🤔 Write a job description for the new office manager role.
🤔 Review your financials and adjust your budget for the upcoming quarter.
🤔 Respond to a text from your project manager about a future materials order.
🤔 Prep for a meeting with a big customer about their change orders.

The hallmark of a great leader is being able to discern what is and isn’t important. Your priorities should ultimately be guided by the goals you’ve set in your strategic plan.

That being said, regardless of which industry you’re in or the details of your annual plan, as your company’s leader, the best use of your time involves the thinking and strategic work that often gets pushed to the back burner because it’s the hardest and the most consuming.

We’re not going to dictate exactly how the items in the above list should be ranked for you, but you should at least be able to identify the tasks that do and don’t qualify as important, in which case it will look something like this:

Now, to be clear… we’re not saying you can ignore the less important stuff. But this is about priorities, remember? What most deserves your attention?

Each of the items in the “Important” list above have a high impact on the health and growth of your business. The others are related to daily operations. They likely aren’t urgent and, ideally, can be delegated to someone else to handle.

Your time should then get scheduled accordingly. Which brings us to the big reveal…

The one thing you absolutely need for this to work

It’s all well and good to have a beautifully blocked out calendar, but for your priorization management system to work, you’re gonna need something that, let’s face it, has become a bit of a superpower these days.

✴️FOCUS ✴️

If you’ve set half an hour in your schedule to review your financials, you’ve gotta do it. Eliminate distractions and signal to your team that you are not to be interrupted. For the next half hour, they have to put out their own fires.

Because if you don’t protect your time… no one else will.

How one contractor inspired his entire team to embrace priority management

Ryan Steward’s company, RJS Construction, was growing quickly, but it was costing him over 70 hours a week – and causing him to miss out on precious moments with his family. Realizing the situation was unsustainable, he turned to priority management as a means to tame his time. But he didn’t stop there. One by one, he taught every member of his team how to implement priority management within their own lives.

Now it’s such an ingrained part of their culture, they all keep their notifications switched off and have developed a laser focus that’s led to them doubling their revenues and growing into an $11 million company.

Want to hear more about how he did it? Ryan shares his success story in this episode of the Contractor Evolution podcast.

Pro tips

To close, we want to offer you a few of Ryan Steward’s master tips for nailing priority management so you too can achieve a work life balance that provides space for both a robust business AND meaningful relationships.

• Create to-do lists for both your personal life and work obligations. When it comes time to block schedule… put the personal stuff in first and then schedule around it. Work is never ending. Lost family time you can never get back.
• Tech is a tool, not a toy. Don’t let it become a distraction.
• Money goes where your priorities lead it.
• Employees may be able to work anywhere, but they’ll stay where they have the best life.
• Keep tabs on your priorities. Schedule time to review your schedule.

And we’re not stopping there. To further advance your prioritization exploration, we’ve created this quick tool to show you how to win back at least 5 hours in your week starting TODAY.

Thank you for making the time to read this article. (In case you’re curious, the task would totally sit in the “Important” list.) By learning how to adopt a priority management system, you’ve just unlocked boundless potential for your company, your team and your life.

Go forth, and schedule.

Want to reclaim your time—without sacrificing growth? We can help you do it... Book a free discovery call today.