How to Prioritize an Entire Week's Worth of Tasks in Under 5 Minutes

If you subscribe to my newsletter (which you should!) you'll know that I am all about getting you to your first one million in funding or revenue, fast. 🎉

But the fast part will never happen if you find yourself stuck in procrasti-producing and don't know how to effectively prioritize.

Waaay too many founders fall into the trap of doing tasks that bring them comfort, but that don't actually move the needle for their business.

• If you're a designer, you might spend way too long designing your brand or website.
• If you're a coder, you could be spending way too long perfecting a feature.
• If you're a researcher, you could spend way too long on a white paper proving out your concept

You get the idea.

Whatever your background, that's where you'll likely be spending too much time in the beginning of your business.

I call this procrasti-producing.

It feels great, but it often doesn't actually move the needle.

No shame, we all do it! 

But we have to stop this form of procrastination if we want consistent growth.

I combat procrasti-producing with a VERY simple system I developed called GROW.

In 5 minutes or less you can prioritize all your tasks for the week, in the right order, so you know you'll be GROWING every week. 

The GROW technique is adapted from a popular product management framework called RICE that is used to help developers decide what features to build next. I've just adapted it for any type of team and have included giving you agency to DECIDE if you want to listen to the spreadsheet's calculation (or not).

Ready to dive in? Of course you are!

Get the GROW tool calculator here

How to Use my GROW Calculator to Prioritize Tasks, Fast

It all boils down to three steps:

1. Set your growth goal
2. Brain-dump your task list
3. Calculate the GROW number for each task (don't worry, the calculator does it for you)

And that's it!

In less than 5 minutes you'll be focused and ready for the week.

Below are the step-by-step instructions. (If you have a team, make sure you share this post so that everyone has the same framework for doing the tasks that matter the most.)

Step 1 of 3: Set your growth goal.

Like any good explorer, we can't get where we are going without a map.

In the calculator, fill in the following:

• Your business growth goal 
• Your timeframe we are giving ourselves to achieve the goal
• Your metrics for success - a.k.a. how we will know that we've reached the goal.

Here's an example:

Growth Goal: 500 engaged Startup With Christine subscribers  
Time Frame: 5 weeks
How I'll Know I've Succeeded: 500 subscribers; >50% open rate on my emails; >8% CTR with emails

Growth goals are nearly always related to customer growth (which ultimately equals revenue growth). If you are fundraising, you could also make it related to investor growth (which also leads to money in the bank).

Example 2:

Growth Goal: $1.5M in funding
Time Frame: 90 days
How I'll Know I've Succeeded: $1.5M wired; investors I respect; no check less than $50k.

Step 2 of 3: Brain-dump your task list

The next step is to brain-dump all the things you've been working on (and things you want to work on) in the tasks list.

Here's an example list from me in relation to growing my subscribers:

Step 3 of 3: Calculate your G-R-O-W number for each task

To determine which of your tasks/activities will actually GROW your business, we score them according to the following formula (don't worry, the calculator computes everything for you).

G - Growth

The first step in determining a task's GROW score is to get a sense for how much this task will impact your "growth goal" when a customer encounters it.

The impact can be:

Massive — 3x
High — 2x
Medium — 1x
Low — 0.5x
Minimal — 0.25x

One of my tasks is "design a new logo", but because a customer encountering a new logo will likely have very little impact on acquiring subscribers (my growth goal). then I would grade the "G" component a 0.25.

In contrast, the last task on my list: "Create Google Ads growth course for Mia/Amelia - give it for free to first 200 subscribers" will have a big impact on my goal. So I will give that a score of 3.

R - Reach

Your reach score is the # people (in my case new subscribers) you expect this task will deliver if it succeeds, over the time period you've specified.

Example:
- My growth goal is "500 engaged subscribers"
- I estimate that the task of "write LinkedIn posts" can generate 100 subscribers over my goal period (5 weeks)
- My Reach number for this task is therefore100.

In contrast, the task of "design my new logo" will likely generate very few subscribers. Maybe it will help a couple of people who are on the fence decide to sign up if I look more professional, but I'm guessing won't be a huge number. Therefore I gave this task an 'R' (reach) value of 5.

O - Optimism

How optimistic are you about the estimates for Growth, Reach, and Work?

High confidence — 100%
Medium confidence — 80%
Low confidence — 50%
Moonshot — 20% or less

I am very confident that my "write LinkedIn posts" tasks will get me new subscribers and that I have accurately estimated the Work and Reach. Therefore I will give this a high confidence score of 90%.

W - Work

Finally we have the "Work" element.

Estimate the total amount of time a task will require from all members of your team: you, plus your product, design, and engineering teams. Estimated as a number of “person-days."

For my logo work, it would probably take me 1 day. So the result would be 1.

For LinkedIn, it takes me about 3 hours to write and schedule 5 weekly posts. So the W score would be 0.3

Let the GROW Calculator do the work!

Once you have entered a score for G-R-O-W for each task, your GROW scores will be calculated.

Like magic, it will be REALLY easy to see where you should spend your time.

Now you get to decide:

The last step is to "Decide" what you are actually going to work on.

In the spreadsheet, you will see a dropdown where you can choose from:

1. Do
2. Defer
3. Delete
4. Delegate
5. Needs more research

Even though designing my logo didn't get a high GROW score, I decided that it was still important to me (I just didn't want to procrasti-produce it myself). So I chose "Delegate" and called in a favor from a designer friend who could produce something cool.

Use your best judgement.

The important thing is that after you have scores you can then prioritize your week. Do the things with the highest GROW scores and you'll be making faster progress than ever before.

I hope this saves you time and reduces your stress.

I'm truly wishing you success this week and more growth than ever before.

Your founder friend,

Christine "focused on NOT working 24/7" Outram