Influencer Entrepreneurs: Marketing Tips to Make You More Visible
Surviving in the entrepreneur world is not an easy task. Jenny teaches you how to build a stronger business with blogging and social media tips that are up to date and proven. No more trading time for money! She teaches content and email marketing strategies that helped her build her audience and sell her lifestyle blog for over six figures in 2019. As a former inner city school district teacher she understands the importance of breaking strategies into bite size pieces of information all with the master plan of giving you homework so that you can implement the strategies in your business immediately. Get ready to be able to put her strategies into practice after just one listen!
Influencer Entrepreneurs: Marketing Tips to Make You More Visible
How do you Prioritize Tasks when Everything is on Fire with Skye Waterson
Ever feel like your business is constantly on fire, with urgent tasks multiplying faster than you can handle them? This conversation with ADHD business coach Skye Watterson delivers the practical framework you've been searching for to break free from the overwhelm cycle.
Skye reveals her "Two Minute Focus Formula" (also called the prioritization filter) that transforms how entrepreneurs approach task management. The genius of this system? It acknowledges the specific challenges ADHD entrepreneurs face with executive functioning and working memory, while providing a straightforward method to distinguish between what's truly urgent versus what merely feels pressing. As Skye explains, "Everything else is not urgent. Everything else is in this combination of not urgent or important but not urgent."
The episode dives deep into breaking down overwhelming projects, harnessing dopamine through "sensory stacking" to overcome task initiation difficulties, and creating an "idea trellis" to manage creative thoughts without letting them derail your main priorities. Skye's approach stands out because it combines neuroscience research with practical business strategy - addressing both the motivational and tactical aspects of productivity.
Perhaps most valuable is Skye's framework for aligning prioritization with business goals. When everything seems equally important, returning to your quarterly objectives provides the clarity needed to make confident decisions about what deserves your attention right now.
Whether you have ADHD or simply struggle with the entrepreneurial challenge of competing priorities, this episode delivers immediately applicable strategies to transform your productivity. Ready to put out the fires and focus on what truly grows your business? Grab Skye's free "Two Minute Focus Formula"
Read more HERE
This is the Influencer Entrepreneur's Podcast with Jenny Monroe, where I strategize with business owners on how to grow and scale their businesses to hit their income goals. Do you feel like everything is urgent and you're the only one that can actually fix it? Well, today we're having a conversation of giving you real strategies on how to stay sane when it feels like everything's on fire. Hi Skye, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm great. Thank you for having me. Of course, I'm so excited to have this conversation about how do you prioritize tasks when everything is on fire. But before we jump into that, will you actually introduce yourself and your business to my audience?
Speaker 2:actually introduce yourself and your business to my audience. Yeah, my name is Skye Watterson. I am a former academic turned entrepreneur, and I help other entrepreneurs and business owners with ADHD manage their life, manage their time, so that they're able to grow without the burnout. I love it.
Speaker 1:And I love that you're focusing on ADHD. We have it within my family and I know I have a lot of listeners that kind of struggle with it at times, so being able to put strategies in place are so key. So let's start off. How do you mentally stay grounded when everything feels urgent and important?
Speaker 2:grounded when everything feels urgent and important. One of the first things that I do is I basically go through with you, and well, I would say the first thing is we understand why this is a problem. So, with ADHD, we have executive functioning struggles, which means that, you know, working memory can be hard to hold all the different parts of a task in our head, time blindness, we can overestimate what we can do during the day, and all of these things can just make it feel like you wake up, you get into the office and everything is coming at you. I'm sure we've all had that moment before, and so the first thing that you want to do and I actually have a thing for this you guys can just DM me Unconventional Organization on Instagram, dm me, jenny, and I'll give it to you. But basically, you know what you need to do is go through, first of all, brain dump. So brain dump everything that's in your head. I get a lot of messages from people being like I went into my email to brain dump.
Speaker 2:But now I'm lost. Don't do that. Stick with just what's in your head and then from there, what we're doing is we're going in and we're saying, okay, from here, what needs to be done in the next 24 hours, or there will be a significant external negative consequence or a sink, something that is going to be a bill that doesn't get paid. You'll turn up to a presentation tomorrow. You won't be prepared for it. That's the urgent stuff. That's the stuff that if there was an emergency, you would be trying to finish on your phone in the waiting room or something like that. That's the stuff that you're really, really urgent.
Speaker 2:For you Everything else is not urgent. Everything else is in this combination of not urgent or important but not urgent. And if you do an Eisenhower matrix, which a lot of people would at this point go oh, this is an Eisenhower matrix. The problem with that from an ADHD perspective is again that working memory. It can be difficult to hold multiple steps in our brains at once. So we're kind of coming through and a lot of people that I work with who have ADHD tell me this really helps them a lot because it's very clear.
Speaker 2:There's no like well, I feel bad if I don't do this thing so technically that makes it urgent, and then from there we go into the important stuff and that's where it really starts to help you with your business, because that's where we start to go. Oh yeah, if I did that thing I guess I could grow my revenue 20% in the next year. And I guess I haven't been doing that because I've been checking my email right, yes, oh my goodness, yes.
Speaker 1:So my next question you kind of touched on a little bit was whether or not you use a specific metrics or framework to prioritize your tasks. Is there anything do you send the Eisenhower? You kind of start to use pieces of it, but not all of it, because it ends up being too much. Is there anything that you would specifically say that you would add to that? Add to the Eisenhower matrix or add to what you are already doing as far as when you are trying to prioritize.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the thing that I'm teaching you, it's called the prioritization filter. I call it the two minute focus formula, but that's that's official name that I've done and it's based on. It's based on the research. It's funny, it actually turned into the Eisenhower matrix at the end and I was like, oh, I guess this is an alternative version. But the next piece that I would add to it is okay. Now we need to go in and we need to understand what is important, just like I mentioned.
Speaker 2:So you go through the rest of the list and you pull out. You know one to three things for that week that if you did them, it would be your 80-20. So the piece that I usually add at this point is I work with clients and we figure out what your 80-20 is. What is that thing that you absolutely have to do? I talk about it on the Instagram actually, and if you did this, it's actually already working in your business and if you did this, you could explode your business Maybe if you added this piece.
Speaker 2:You know you talk about product development. If you added this piece to your business, maybe you've had people going, hey, do you have this thing? Could you have this thing? And if you had it, it would have a huge impact. That's your 80-20. That's where we want to pull most of the time your important but not urgent from, and then we put it into your calendar, we block it out like a doctor's appointment and we can talk about the dopamine we add at the beginning in a minute, because that's a whole other piece of ADHD research most people don't know about, which is why I'm so passionate about teaching this, because there are so many little strategies you can do that just make everything so much easier with ADHD.
Speaker 1:And I think I love that you're talking about the things that are important as far as it being connected to revenue, because I think a lot of times we get these creative ideas to add in a new project or service because people are asking for this, but it seems so overwhelming and so daunting. So is there a way that you can get past that feeling of it being so large and break it down to its pieces so that it will help to make it that much simpler to get it done?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, 100%, and I recommend it.
Speaker 2:The first thing I would say is, if you have a large project, the first task of any large project when you have an ADHD brain and I'm sure neurotypicals as well, but I don't work with them, so I wouldn't know and the first thing you want to do is you want to sit down and plan.
Speaker 2:So the first thing that I want to see on your calendar, if you have a big project, is plan this project, and what that's going to look like is you're going to go ahead, you're going to give yourself a little coffee, chocolate biscuits somewhere, comfy, you know, do nice things, basically sensory support. It doesn't have to be a chocolate biscuit, but you know why not and you're going to go ahead and be like this isn't so bad, and then you're going to have like background music and then you're going to sit down and you're going to start working through this particular task. How am I going to plan this? So there is a tool you know you're talking about AI on the podcast recently and there is a tool that has, you know, a little AI tool that I recommend.
Speaker 2:It's called Goblin Tools, g-o-b-l-i-n and it's free, it's built for people with ADHD and you can go in there and you can type in the task that you want to do and then it will break down that task into its component parts, and I'm sure ChatGPT does that too now In fact, I haven't done it with ChatGPT for a minute, but I'm sure it does so using something like that can help. Or sitting down and just grabbing a piece of paper and going okay, what are all the steps involved? I love to use the example of say, you're in an office and you're like I really want to improve, I want to get a better rug. I'm an influencer, I want to get a better rug. Shoot really nice content, all that kind of stuff. It's good for sound quality.
Speaker 2:You might think, right, get a new rug. Simple, that's an easy task. Okay, you have to. Are you going to buy this on Craigslist? Are you going to get this new? Are we going to? Where are we going to put the old rug? How are we need to measure? We need to find a measuring tape, we need to, and so on and so on. So even something as simple as get a rug has a lot of component parts to it and it's you know, once we realize that, we realize that sometimes, when we're not doing a task, there's kind of three reasons most people who have ADHD won't do a task. It's too boring. It's too confusing. This is a working memory problem or it's emotionally salient like we're going to get rejected, or you know, those kinds of things are coming into play.
Speaker 1:So good. So you mentioned before about getting almost a little bit of a dopamine hit before you started. Was that the chocolate biscuit or what exactly?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, yeah. So I talk about it as sensory stacking and it's based on research into the dopamine transfer deficit, so neuroscience research about how our brain works. There seems to be a little deficit when we start a task, because if you're ADHD, your brain doesn't go. Oh my gosh, you're going to do this task and then you'll have paid your taxes and you're going to have a rebate and it's going to be amazing and you know, like good job you, it doesn't go. Oh my gosh, you're going to do this task and then you'll have paid your taxes and you're going to have a rebate and it's going to be amazing. And you're like good job you, it doesn't do that. It does like this is boring, this sucks. Can we not do this please? And that like it's sort of like you're like, you know, shepherding a grumpy teenager to do a task, and what that means is we need to negotiate.
Speaker 2:So think about your five senses touch, taste, smell, sound. What can we give you to start the task and what can we stack? So you might say, okay, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna read an article, I'm gonna have a cup of coffee, I'm gonna, you know, eat some spicy something. You know, something fun. I'm going to sit somewhere I like in front of a nice window, and once I've done that, and obviously this you know, don't scroll TikTok right now. This is not, this is good. You'll be stuck for ages, something you're going to stop. But once I've sat down at my desk with the intention of working and I've started with this fun thing, it's a lot easier for you to then go okay, cool, now I'm going to. And what I recommend you do to support working memory next is actually grab a little post-it note, something like this, and just write down what you're going to do during this work session like a little recipe to yourself for when you forget later.
Speaker 2:And so this is, you know, one of the pieces that we want to add in. And then from there we open the application, we play around and then we, and then we start. So that kind of shift, I mean, I've seen people go from I spent all day just going from fire to fire at work. I was never making progress, and even if I did, I didn't want to do the thing to consistently doing the thing that they've been putting off for six months or a year. And from a business perspective it has tremendous upside because you can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on business strategy but if you never open the program or you never actually implement it and build the thing you need to build, you're not actually going to be able to do it.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love that you talk about post-it notes, because I talk about post-it notes a lot. We often refer to them as breadcrumbs to be able to get back to remembering what it was that we had that great idea for. And I think one of the things that comes up with my audience is often is that they have so many ideas and breadcrumbs and they get on these post-it notes and they're not organized. They don't remember exactly what it was. Do you have kind of a strategy to put in place, almost like a parking lot for ideas, and how to help yourself prioritize those based on where you're at?
Speaker 2:100%. So the thing I talked about right at the beginning, the two-minute focus formula, the way I want you guys to think about that is this is your one list. We love to make a new list every day and we throw them. It's kind of like you've got an orchard and you plant a tree and then you never look at the tree again and the tree dies and now we have a tree full of dead orchards. We want one tree, we're going to water it, take care of it, we're going to plant it.
Speaker 2:So, wherever you can do that, everything I teach is app agnostic. You can use a journal, you can use a very hardcore AI system. Whatever you want to do, it'll work on both. But you need one place where you are putting your tasks down and then you are filtering it. Like we said, is it urgent, is it important? And then, at the end of the day, you're kind of going through, you're removing the things that you've done and you're adding new things to the top.
Speaker 2:But there is an idea and I actually teach this quite extensively in my community about this idea of the idea trellis, because it's almost like ideas can be weeds in our task list and we have a bunch of tasks and then we have a bunch of ideas oh, what about this and what about this? And I thought about this and I heard about that. So we want to have, like, a different section. It can be a different section of your journal or it can be a link, you know, as long as it's connected to the list somehow, so we don't lose it. And that is where I recommend you put all your ideas. So, all throughout the day, whenever you have an idea, you want a one touch system. You press one button, you open one page, you write them all down and then you schedule a time once a month, once a week, to look at those ideas and see if they're going to become tasks.
Speaker 1:Okay, I love that because it is. It becomes this almost instead of a parking lot, it becomes a dumpster fire of just all these different ideas. And where do I go with all of that? So that is great, I love it Exactly. Prelous. It's so pretty too, so much better than a dumpster fire.
Speaker 2:Keep the vines away from the tree. We do not want it to choke the task list tree?
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, my goodness, okay. So how do you handle when there's competing projects that seem just as important and urgent as others? Is there a way that you choose what doesn't get done? Something weigh in on that, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a tricky one, and sometimes and this is why you know so much of what I do is high touch, like I will always be talking to people and chatting with them and problem solving with them. Because it's it is tricky, because 99% of the time, what I've found is that when you say everything seems urgent, what you mean is that the people are bringing you things that are urgent, that that are urgent to them but not to you, and that is sometimes the business owner thing. It's really important that we bring your goals in line here. I want to know where you're going. Where are you going this quarter? Are you trying to gain recognition?
Speaker 2:You know, maybe you have a lead flow problem, and this is where I love what I do, because the business side comes in and I'm like, okay, you acquisition in acquisition, expansion, like what are we doing? Is your sales pipeline strong? And if you are in a position where you're like, look, we have a ton of leads but we're not closing them at above 40%, you know 40% or above, okay, well, now you have a sales problem. So that's the thing that you need to fix, so that's the priority. So if your website could be nicer, that's not my problem right now, whereas if you have a bunch of people coming in but they seem confused about what you're doing and they're not really buying, then maybe you have the issue with this, with the website. So I recommend and that's why what I teach I teach actually two sessions a week on Mondays we go through the ADHD side, motivation, and then on Thursdays we talk tactics. Because you got to have both, you got to make sure you're doing both.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, my goodness, I'm so glad you tied it back to goals, because that is something that we talk a lot about on the podcast.
Speaker 1:It's the importance of really understanding not only your goals but also the mission and vision for your business, because I think a lot of times we have a tendency of getting sucked into social media and we see all these oh run a seven figure business and in reality that's not necessarily what everybody is looking to do, and having a full team and having all the aspects that have to go into that. So determining what your absolute vision is for your business and making sure that what you're going to attempt to do is in line with that, so determining what your absolute vision is for your business and making sure that what you're going to attempt to do is in line with that so I love that. Exactly 90 day goals, so important. So question what do you do when someone else is threatening your focus? So a lot of my listeners either have children, grandchildren, other responsibilities and personal will sneak in and kind of take their knees out on what they're able to focus on. Do you have any suggestions for how they can handle it? Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have a suggestion. And then I also have one point that was it's not mine. I was. Amy Landino came on my podcast and she was like it's funny, we want these families and these partners. And then we look around and we're like who are all these people asking for my time and food? I have things to do. I have to build a business. So, you know, one side of it is there's a negotiation, like you know, we do have to, you know, take care of. You know I have two little toddlers right now. So life is, you know, a bit different.
Speaker 2:So we do have to kind of and this is a game with ADHD, where the time blindness comes in we know we can really like, oh, one free day and I could get everything done in my entire business, you know, all the way down to the bottom of the to-do list. So we want to have a bit of a conversation about how much time we have and what we could really get done in it. I recommend thinking about it as halving. What you think you can get done is usually an accurate estimate. And then from there, when we're talking about boundaries and it's really true, sometimes people will come into your office and all the time and they won't respect that you're at work. If you search ADHD and boundaries this is a really strange thing that we didn't even realize the first or second thing that comes up is a website article that I wrote a while ago because apparently no one's written about this. But essentially, you know, we want to make sure that we are communicating with them. You know this is the checklist I go through. Did you communicate that you actually want to get work done? Surprisingly often that doesn't happen. Did you confirm that they had understood and they got it Like okay, on Mondays it's happening.
Speaker 2:And then the really important part for ADHD were you consistent with the fact that on Monday you're getting work done? Because if you say, hey, I'm working in my office on Mondays, but then half the Mondays you're like, ah, who cares? You know I don't want to do it, and this is a reality Like when I teach this in the community, a ton of hands go up. We all have this problem.
Speaker 2:It can be confusing for your partner or your kids that you're actually trying to get work done right now, because you're kind of in the space where you're like well, I wasn't in the zone then and now I'm in the zone, so I was distracting myself and talking to you and now I need to focus. So we need to have a bit of a conversation about that. Sometimes we need to put some things in the calendar and then things like the step into focus routine et cetera make it easier to actually get done. But if you have confirmed it and you are being consistent and you know it's clearly communicated, then, yeah, we need to have a conversation with that person and say, hey, you know, I have some goals and maybe bring them in. You know, like if we hit this revenue target, we all get whatever thing that you wanted to do. You know, and that kind of you can help as well.
Speaker 1:yes, oh, my goodness, so good, because, honestly, that is something that I have struggled with over the years, because, as my girls got older, it was easier to kind of put the time to be able to say these are my office hours. But it for me, it was the consistency, like you're saying, well, they asked for something and I'd hop up, um, and I would do what they needed without reminding them hey, we talked about this. Like you're 14, you can go make your own eggs, like it is new, but yes, so so good. All right, so talk a little bit more.
Speaker 1:We're going to I want to make sure that we link to your two minute focus formula. We're going to make sure that's in the show notes, blog posts, it's in the YouTube video, so everyone needs to make sure that they grab it. I plan to go grab it myself, because everything that you're saying totally applies to what I am going through. As far as prioritizing, you've talked a little bit about it. Give us a little bit more. What is it a training? Is it a guide? What can we expect to get?
Speaker 2:yeah, so it's it is two minutes. I'm not making that up because we know basically it's. It's something that I've taught for years that I have distilled down as as simply as possible. So when we talked about the idea of like, okay, brain dump and then and break it down like this and do it like this, it's as simple as possible. When you sign up, there is an option to get a dashboard which goes into more detail and more depth, and that'll be there for you as well. And then if you need help figuring out your 80-20 and how to actually do your 80-20, that support is there for you as well.
Speaker 2:But at the base level, what this is is, if you feel overwhelmed, just grab this, read it, do it for five minutes. You will not feel overwhelmed anymore. That's the most important thing. And the first time you write a list, like, do not be surprised if you spend like a full couple of minutes just writing down everything that was in your head. That was a task, because there's a ton of stuff there and one of the things we haven't talked about is the strengths of ADHD creative thinking, original thinking, problem solving but if your brain is full of tasks that you're trying to remember that are constantly falling out of your head and coming back in, because that's kind of what it's like you're not going to have the space to be able to really use those strengths.
Speaker 1:So good. We are going to make sure that we obviously link to that Guy. I appreciate you so much for taking the time to speak with me and my audience. It was an absolute pleasure, all right? Well, there you have it. You have actual systems and strategies that you can put in place to make sure that things are not on fire, that you can actually prioritize what you are going to get done. First and foremost, if you haven't already, make sure that you grab our strategic growth plan guide. We are linking to that in the description and, as always, we appreciate you for listening in.
