As an entrepreneur, there’s tons to do, from answering customer support emails to purchasing software for your team to hiring.

It’s hard to determine what to focus on.

It’s easy to get stuck doing small tasks that make you feel “busy” and productive. And this is why it’s important to prioritize and focus.

By focusing on priorities, you:

1. Will be less stressed out about small tasks;
2. Can focus on large impact projects to grow your business.

Our VP of Growth, Brian Balfour, has plenty of experience with this problem. He sold two companies for millions and, through his experience as an entrepreneur, came up with a system to automatically prioritize his tasks to put first things first. He also uses email templates to email less time-consuming and more efficient.

Now he can focus on finding ways to grow our company than wasting time on low impact tasks.

Take a look at how he prioritizes and the exact email templates he uses.

 Once you’ve prioritized your tasks, here are two more tools help a busy entrepreneur stay focused and productive.

1. Pocket – Throughout the workday, you might come across interest articles that you want to read, but you may not be able to read it right at that moment. That’s where Pocket comes in. It lets you save articles so you can read them later when you’re not busy.
2. Evernote web clipper – If you ever need to take a screenshot and email it to someone, Evernote’s web clipper extension for Google Chrome speeds up the process and lets you add annotations to the image for simple explanations.
3. Buffer – If the article you read was interesting and you want to share it, use Buffer to share it with your Twitter followers or Facebook fans without ever logging into any of your accounts.

For more tips on how to be a more effective entrepreneur, review the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book summary and follow the action steps.

What steps do you take to prioritize your schedule? What are you