How to prioritize your ideas

If you’re like us, you have notes everywhere with ideas. Sticky notes on your computer…lists by your desk…notes in multiple documents on your computer. You think of something you want to try then you write it down. It’s normal.

But now what do you do with all of those ideas. The first step is to block time on your calendar to work on the ideas. Go through all of the lists, notes, and random pieces of paper and type them in one document. Now you can easily see all of them at once. If you can, you should include the following items for each idea:

• Title - brief name to help you remember it

• The Idea - description of the idea with some details 

• Next Steps - the immediate next steps to make this happen

Next, you need to filter these ideas by Impact and Effort.

Impact is what it will do for your business, team, or yourself. Effort includes resources, money, and time. All ideas will have some impact and will take some resources. The idea is to compare them to each other. We use a quadrant map to visually plot the ideas.

Once you have them plotted against each other, it’s easy to see which ones deserve your time and resources. It’s all about focusing on the right things.