Mastering Priorities-The Rule of all Rules

BML #104: If you don't master what a priority is, you will not become your greatest possibility.

Success in anything means mastering your priorities. But first, let’s ask: what is a priority?

Most people are incredibly good at staying busy but terrible at knowing what truly matters. They confuse activity with progress and struggle to consistently execute around what’s important.

As a business coach, I can’t emphasize enough how often I have to train people to build the habit of asking, “What is the priority?”

Did you complete your Time Audit? Start by writing down all the tasks you do over the course of a week/month/quarter. The next step is to bucketize each activity:

• Bucket 1: Money Desk (MD) – This is what grows your personal net worth or brings you happiness.

• Bucket 2: Operations Desk (OD) – The tasks necessary to keep the business running.

• Bucket 3: Address and Delete Immediately – These are distractions and should be eliminated.

Here’s where people get lost—they don’t know the difference between what actually grows them (Money Desk) and what they’re doing just to keep things running (Operations Desk).

Example:

I recently spoke with a highly successful sales account executive working at a fast-growing B2B SaaS company. He had been with the company since its early days when growth was the focus.

Back then, the executives had him and other top salespeople 90% focused on what they were hired to do: sell. That’s where his Money Desk was, and that’s how he grew his personal and professional success.

But as the company matured, things changed. He found himself saddled with more and more operational work—work that had nothing to do with selling.

It frustrated him, and it frustrated another top AE.

Why was this happening? He found out the company was planning to sell and wanted to maximize profits to get a higher valuation. To do that, they were cutting operations staff and shifting OD tasks onto the salespeople.

The result? The AE started looking for a new job. The company had shifted his priorities, and that decision likely cost them.

Did they sell the company? Not at this point which is over 2 years later. But I’m guessing the extra workload on their salespeople reduced revenue more than it increased profit, which probably hurt their valuation.

Either way, their priorities were wrong.

In the example, I’m explaining the misalignment from the employee’s perspective, but the real issue goes back to the owners—and how their priorities were off.

As the owner of your company, you have to know the difference between your Money Desk (MD) and your Operations Desk (OD). In the case I shared, the owners got their priorities wrong. Their only focus was on getting a high valuation for the sale of the company.

Now, I get it—when you’re making big decisions like setting yourself up for a sale, you need balance. But here’s the problem: their priorities were so out of line that their top sales AE was looking for a new job. He wasn’t focused on growing revenue. He wasn’t working on his MD. That’s a huge red flag.

Conclusion: You must master your priorities at every step. That’s why one of the first levels of my Big 5 – Value Lever Mastery framework is all about “Mastering Priorities.” If you don’t, you’ll end up like those owners, sacrificing long-term growth for short-term gains.

Let me circle back to one of my favorite Peter Drucker quotes: “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”

Focus on the right priorities. Every single time.