On Prioritizing Multiple Ideas

As an aspiring entrepreneur with many ideas, how do you prioritize work?

Even when all your ideas seem to have equal weight?

I currently have three projects in flight that are interesting to me:
- Spend Better, a business directory website
- Stay Woven, a personal relationship manager app
- Become A Senior Engineer, an educational and community resource for software devs

Yesterday I set my day’s major task to establishing a newsletter for Spend Better. The website is prone to bounces, so I wanted to capture its audience to prompt return visits and do customer interviews.

I totally skipped this task. Intentionally.

Task setting and decision making is easiest when you have a specific goal. Occasionally that goal will be reactionary to outside influences, like losing a job or changes to the market. More often, your goal will be a planned outcome, such as $X monthly revenue or getting 1,000 new customers.

I’ve recognized that I need to be more conscious and specific with my goals and the tasks to achieve them. Treat myself like my own employee. As a boss, would I be happy with what I worked on and accomplished that day?

I’m self-employed and making $0 a month. My goal is to develop regular revenue, so I can continue being self-employed and have a successful entrepreneurial journey.

Spend Better is a passion project. It may have revenue eventually. But it won’t help me achieve my goal now.

Stay Woven has a better chance at achieving a revenue goal, however it is a larger time and effort to bring to market.

Become a Senior Engineer is the best candidate for my goal. It’s uses my strongest expertise from my 20-year engineering career, it’s the market I’m most familiar with, and it is the quickest product to deliver.

Starting yesterday and until an obvious pivot arises, Become a Senior Engineer will be my primary focus. I want all my employees (me) to be focused on achieving my business goal, and that means ensuring they (me) are utilizing their time wisely.

I’ll still be working on Spend Better and Stay Woven - both have tasks that will help me become a more well-rounded entrepreneur. But their tasks will be lower priority, and be the first to be postponed or skipped if things need to shift.

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