mattgrayisok

*An attempt at short form blogging so that I actually do it.*

I've read/listened a lot of startup guide books, and a lot of business self-help books over the last few years. Many of them have told me to 'focus on the task with the maximal return' or 'prioritise revenue generating tasks'.

That sounds great. But how is one to determine which of their 500 TODO list tasks are the ones which will ultimately achieve that?

I have three Trello boards for Servd tasks:

• Servd Technical
• Servd Marketing
• Servd General

I add ideas and TODOs to these boards as they come up during the day. Respectively they have the following number of cards currently pending in them:

• 116
• 24
• 4

These are all things that I either need to do or would like to do.

Traditional advice would have me select the one task out of all of these which will have the largest impact on my business's bottom line in the short to medium term.

Given that all of these tasks are still on my TODO list my ability to quantify their impact on my business is somewhat hindered.

So I resort to my fallback sorting algorithm for TODO tasks: what do I fancy tackling today?

As a developer, this normally results in me developing something.

Sometimes I'll take a break from that and instead spend some time freaking out about not knowing what I should be doing next, before settling back into developing.

Not the best strategy I'm sure.

Everything on my TODO list is achievable. The hardest thing about all of this is deciding what to do next. And so far I haven't figured out how to make that decision in any coherently logical way.

So I develop, and then react to other things that happen.

So far it's going ok, but any advice is welcome.