In this lesson, I'm going to give you the answers to the question I posed in the previous video, which was to identify and problem solve: How do you prioritize your tasks? What to work on, what to not work on in order to most effectively and optimally get to your life's goals. That's what we all want to find out.

Class Project

I'm going to give you the answers for a few possible prioritization systems. But I don't want you to settle for the answers. I want you to turn this into your class project as you go through all the videos. Refine your answer. Don't settle for mine, take mine and make it better, or don't take mine make your own. But make it even better. Make it more sophisticated, more elaborate, more effective, more personalized for you, because you're the only one who knows what's best for you. So now that we have your class project identified, and if you really solve that well, this class really will be transformational for your whole life. With that in mind, I am going to explain to you how the most successful people in the world currently solve this problem of prioritization.

Prioritization Tactics

Tactic 1: Focus on the Top 2 Tasks

Take the 10 things you have to do this week in your life and, and then eight of those things get crossed off and you don't even do them. People will get mad at you. You will fail at some things because of that. But you see the trick in this, and this is a very common tactic among CEOs, successful people, people who are busy and who become less busy but accomplish more. When you say yes to those 10 things that were on your to do list, it means you are spreading yourself too thin and you are not going to do the best work if your attention is divided by 10. But if I say, only say yes to those two things and say no to the eight things, when you say no to something, it doesn't mean you're bad or mean. It means whatever you're saying no to, there is suddenly something you're saying more of a yes to. And of course, in our plan, where you're going to say more of a yes to the higher priority, more impactful things, you're not choosing not to work 80% of the time. You're choosing to take that 80% of your effort and give it to your most impactful tasks, which are the ones that are going to propel you personally and in your career.

Tactic 2: Long-Term Value Focus

I want to give you another way that top CEOs think, this is Elon Musk, Bill Gates, all these types of people, whatever you may think of them, they're very active on social media. People love them, hate them, whatever, but their productivity tactics speak for themselves. They've accomplished a lot and here's what they do. And this is actually something that I do myself and I can really vouch for this. You take all your projects and you consider which are the ones that are building the most impactful long term value, so that in 5 or 10 years I can be a king. As opposed to a lot of times we have to do tasks that keep things afloat in the near term: work, for money, but have zero or very little long term impact. Then you're not building long term wealth or value. And the long term building of assets, wealth and value is what's going to get tremendous success. So this is the second exercise for you. Of all the things you have to do or can do, what gives you the potential for the long term value and what are the things that keep things afloat in the short term but don't have any long term value? And you want to always take things away that only are for the short term and build the long term value things. That's when you'll succeed.

Conclusion

So that's our first challenge in problem solving, your own prioritization. I encourage you to do these exercises and we're going to touch upon your own personal prioritization as our class project. Now, we're going to move on to the next few things to think about when you are problem solving.