How I Prioritize Goals in Life and Business
Read this if you have 25 things on your To-do List
March 17th, 2022 — Greetings from Hamburg Germany
Hey there, and welcome! 👋 Thank you for reading Woody’s World.
Today I’m going to teach you a simple framework to help you make better decisions about how you invest your time and energy.
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Here we go:
A Plan for Progress
Recently, I’ve been fed up with my lack of progress.
So inspired by my friend Owen (who writes an awesome newsletter), I started a new Sunday Review habit. After five or six iterations, I broke my review into three categories:
Health
Wealth
Relationships
(Maybe you know these as the “eternal markets” in business)
From there, I decided to pick one simple goal and one simple system for each category, Atomic Habits style.
In theory, this could look like this:
Goal: Build muscle
System: Enter the gym on Tuesday and Thursday after work
Goal: Land a ghostwriting client
System: Send 35 Twitter DMs every day before dinner
Goal: Land a date
System: Swipe 25 Tinder profiles every day before lunch — just kidding :)
But there’s a problem…
As I began to brainstorm health goals, I quickly realized that I had 25 potential prospects— from straightening my posture to improving my sleep!
And so the question became,
How do I prioritize one goal in the face of countless options?
Theory of Constraints
I leaned into a framework I learned from my first ghostwriting client.
My first client was a monster tech founder. Multiple 8 and 9 figure businesses. 30 Million in VC Raised. The type of person to bootstrap businesses on the weekend for fun.
They taught me a very simple framework that made the solution to my problem immediately clear.
In short, if you have 10 goals you could focus on, focus on the one that makes all the others easier. Eliminate the bottleneck, which unlocks the potential for growth.
Eliminating My Health Bottleneck
And so, that’s how I decided to prioritize my sleep this week.
Because if you sleep better, it’s much easier to
Go to the gym at 6:00 am
Make rational food decisions
Or achieve pretty much any other health goal
So here’s my health goal and system from this week:
Goal: Sleep 8-9 hours without an alarm
System: Unplug my wifi router and read Percy Jackson Diebe im Olymp at 9:00 PM
Now, it’s 7:37 pm as I’m writing this to you inside Espresso House (Swedish Starbucks), so I have about one hour and twenty minutes before I need to disconnect. I’ll end with this:
If you’re struggling with what to prioritize,
Ask yourself, does one of these opportunities, problems, or goals make all the following options easier?
If so, that might be the best place to start.
Thank you for reading!
P.S. I’m curious, if you had to pick one health goal and system, what would it be?