one of the most important skills that you need to learn in organizing your mind in organizing your time is learning how to get your priorities in the right order and I'm going to talk about that in this video now there's a great tendency when you're an entrepreneur to give equal weight to everything equator every task that you have to fulfill and quite often especially when you're just starting out you find that you have a lot of different tasks to fulfill you've got to do all sorts of things in your home in your business and so on so you might have to do things like cooking cleaning looking after your family home maintenance or things that are going to take up your home life transport you know dad's taxi takes everybody where they want to go in your work life you may have to look after your websites you're going to need to find new clients you're going to have to create products or provide the services you're going to have to handle correspondence you know emails phone calls letters that sort of thing you're going to have to keep up with the accounts and paying the bills and it can be very difficult to fit it all in no wonder our caricature in the middle here look so glum so you have to accept when you're an entrepreneur when you run your business and then even in your in your life as a whole that you can't do everything there's just 24 hours in a day and you can't do everything that needs to be done it's just simply not physically possible because of course the more things you do the more things that you find to do and if you give each of them equal weight then you soon find yourself in a bit of a problem so you have to learn to set your priorities you can't give everything equal weight and you have to accept that some tasks are more important than others so what you have to do is you need to learn how to rank tasks in order of importance and you need to rank them like this really first of all top priority are the tasks that you must do come what may come whatever you must do whatever this task is this could be something in your business life like going out and getting some new clients it could be something in your home life like you must pay your mortgage that sort of thing and then there's are things that you should do and these are the things that you should do and you're going to try your damnedest to but you can't 100% guarantee that you're going to be able to do it because they don't have as high a priority as the things that you must do and then those are the things that you could do is you could do if there's time otherwise it's no big deal and then there's the stuff that you can't do and I suppose this along with what you must do is one of the most important categories because you can't do everything now exactly what your top priority is going to be is going to depend a lot on you on your business and your circumstances so when it comes to deciding what sort of priority to give something you need to ask yourself if I don't do whatever today what's the worst thing that can happen now if the consequences are dire then this task is going to fall into the must-do category so for example if you're not gonna pay the mortgage then you're going to get kicked out of your house then obviously that comes into the must-do category if the consequences are inconvenient then this task will fall into the should do category oh you should do it you should try and do it but if you don't well there'll be problems but it won't be a really serious problem and if the consequences are no big deal then this task should fall into the could do category or the can't do category and when you're deciding what's going to fall into the can't do category you need to learn how to say no without feeling guilty now lots of people have a big hang-up about this and I suppose it goes back to childhood where you're bought up to please people so you say yes and of course it is easier to say yes to something than it is to say no design because you don't want to hurt people's feelings and that sort of thing but when you say yes to everything you are really not doing yourself any favors because as I said you can't do everything so you need to learn to say no without feeling guilty and if you don't have the time to do something then you don't have the time to do something it is that simple it's not about being selfish you know lots of people will lay on a guilt trip when you say oh no I can't do this oh really why not divert blah blah blah but it's not that way at all it's not about being selfish because when you say no to something it means that you're able to say yes to something that's more important so something that goes at a low priority and you say no to it it means that you're saying yes to having the time to doing something that's more important that's something that's in the must-do category or the should do category now there's a very good book on this subject called how to say no without feeling guilty by Patti Brightman and Connie hatch and you can buy it at amazon.com and good bookstores and it goes into this in a lot of detail about the psychology of how you say no without feeling guilty but once you can do that once you've got that skill you should be able to get your priorities in order very easy