When you decide to pursue a life of entrepreneurship, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that there’s a LOT you need to do to be successful.

You need to be able to stay organized.

You need to be able to focus on your bottom line and pursue your most profitable ventures.

You need to ask others for help (trust me – trying to do everything by yourself will only set you up for failure).

You need to set boundaries between your business and personal life.

But there’s one entrepreneurial skill that’s served me far more than any of these other skills. One quality that can really help you succeed as an entrepreneur (in both life and business):

You need to become a ruthless de-prioritizer.

Why is De-Prioritization Important?

I’ve talked a lot about the idea of setting priorities on this blog. Priorities guide your daily actions and your overall trajectory in life – so it’s crucial to have a very clear understanding of what they are for you. Everyone’s priorities are unique, so taking the time to clarify what YOUR specific priorities in life are will do wonders for your clarity and sense of fulfillment in purpose in life.

But equally as important as being able to clarify your biggest priorities is being able to shift, delegate and delete things that AREN’T your biggest priorities. You need to be able to remove emotional attachment and unnecessary stress from tasks, and be okay with shifting them to tomorrow, later, or never.

There are a couple great strategies for doing this. One of my favorite is the RADD method, which works especially great for email.

Really, where this skill comes in handy is in the middle or end of each day, when you need to re-assess your to-do list. Which reminds me of another important understanding you need to develop as an entrepreneur:

Become okay with the idea of not crossing off everything on your daily to do list. Accept this as the norm.

I can’t tell you how much this concept changed my day-to-day stress levels and fulfillment as an entrepreneur. As soon as you accept the fact that “yes, you will try to get everything done on your daily to-do list, but if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay!” – your mindset will change drastically.

Yes, of course, you should be shooting to get a healthy, substantial amount of work done each day. And yes, you should make sure you’re not constantly, intentionally overloading yourself – you need to have an understanding of what’s physically possible to accomplish in a day.

But – if at the middle or end of the day, you realize that you’re not going to get everything done – this is okay. And this is where being a ruthless de-prioritizer comes into play.

How to Begin De-Prioritizing

Even the most ambitious, motivated, task-oriented individuals can admit (if they’re being honest) that there are always some tasks on their list that are more important than others. And this is the way it should be! Your daily list of action items should have a range of urgency and importance.

So to set yourself up for success, you should prioritize working on your most important and urgent tasks first – before you do anything else each day.

Anything that is less urgent, and less important can almost always be pushed.

In theory – de-prioritization is that simple. But the pressure we put on ourselves and the high-achiever standards that we hold ourselves to tend to cloud the understanding of this concept. In fact, one of my biggest business breakthroughs to-date had nothing to do with my actual business; it had to do with realizing that so much of the daily stress and overwhelm I was experiencing from my task lists was fully self-induced.

*Mind. Blown.*

Would my client really care if I delivered this email at 10 pm tonight vs. at 11 am tomorrow morning? Probably not. As long as I’m being transparent about work and performance, and maintaining an open line of communication.

Should this event board I’m volunteering on take 4 hours of time out of my day today? Absolutely not. Break it up and de-prioritize.

Will my blog audience send me hate mail if I don’t publish 3 new blog posts this week? No way. (Right…? 🙂 ) I’ll get one up this week, and 3 next week.

Can I push this task to tomorrow, or even the weekend without any major consequence? Oh, I can? Then let’s do it.

This is a glimpse inside my new outlook as a ruthless de-prioritizer. Reading through some of those example statements might make them seem flippant, but I promise you – this adjustment to your thinking and your time-management is so necessary.

Begin your journey of becoming a ruthless de-prioritizer by looking at your daily to-do list and pushing two tasks that aren’t urgent or important. And dive into the work that IS.