Last Updated on April 11, 2023 9:17 pm
It's almost impossible to purposefully grow your MSP without being organised and productive. Here's a simple three step method to be both
If you're disorganised and unproductive, and it's giving you stress, RELAX.
You're not the first MSP owner to feel that way. And you certainly won't be the last.
To fix this, you just need to send in the Productivity Police... call in a C.O.P.
Capture
- Find one piece of productivity software that you could love and marry. Try a few then commit to one. Just one. This must then be your sole task manager. And beware of shiny object syndrome. Personally I've been happily married to Todoist since 2009
- Make sure your software has a place to dump any thought that's in your head. One of the core concepts of good productivity is that the second you have a thought, you record it somewhere and stop thinking about it. This means you never forget anything, and leaves mental room for new thoughts! Todoist has an inbox where I can enter tasks manually, email them, add via Siri, or automate them in via Zapier
Organise
- Once you accept you will never, ever get all your tasks done, you can relax and work out which are the most important to prioritise
- There are many ways to do this. The simplest and most powerful way is the Eisenhower Matrix
Plan
Watch the 2 min video before reading this bit
- 1st quadrant: Urgent and important: Do first tasks: Schedule 60 mins every morning to do these. If you don't have any, you'll feel like you just won some free time
- 2nd quadrant: Not urgent, but important: Scheduled tasks: This is is where you want to spend most of your time. These are the tasks that grow your MSP
- 3rd quadrant: Urgent but not important: Delegated tasks: Give these to your team or outsourced experts. But do track what you've delegated and schedule to chase if they don't deliver on time (you delegate the task but not the responsibility)
- 4th quadrant: Not urgent, not important: Don't do tasks: It's important you label them so they can't return to your mind in the future as an unfinished task. But you never do these tasks.
Of everything I've written here, the concept of deciding NOT to do tasks is perhaps the most powerful.
