How to Choose Which Business Idea to Focus On (Without Burning Out)
If you’re a visionary founder, ideas are not your problem.
Your problem is that they all feel important, they all feel urgent, and they all want your attention right now.
New program idea. Rebrand. Podcast. Retreat. Certification. Membership. Don’t forget your current clients still exist.
When you try to move all of them forward at once, you don’t feel like a CEO. You feel like air traffic control at rush hour.
Let’s fix that.
Here’s a simple way to turn your idea overload into a clean, confident 90-day runway, without killing your creativity.
Step 1: Get Every Idea Out of Your Head and Into a “Hangar”
Instead of carrying your ideas in your head (aka: the world’s worst project management tool), you’re going to put them in a single, visible list.
Call it your Idea Hangar.
You can use:
A simple spreadsheet
Notion / ClickUp / Asana
A whiteboard or sticky notes
For each idea, jot down:
Working title
One-sentence summary
Type (offer, campaign, internal improvement, partnership, etc.)
The goal: Nothing lives in your brain. If it’s not in the hangar, it doesn’t exist.
Step 2: Score Ideas Using 4 Filters
Now we’re going to give your intuition some structure.
For each idea, score from 1–5 on:
Impact – How big of a result or revenue jump could this create in the next 90 days?
Effort – How much time/energy/complexity does it realistically require?
Readiness – How close is this to “shovel-ready”? (assets, audience, skills)
Alignment – How well does this support where you actually want the business to go?
Pro tip:
You don’t need “perfect numbers.” The win is forcing yourself to think clearly about each idea instead of letting excitement make all the decisions.
Step 3: Choose a Primary “Flight” and Two Supporting Projects
Your nervous system needs one main priority. Your creative brain needs some variety. We can have both.
From your scored list, choose:
1. Primary Flight – The core project that gets your best energy for the next 90 days
2. Supporting Projects – Smaller initiatives that either feed the primary project or improve operations
Everything else? It goes into Holding Pattern or Hangar Storage.
This isn’t you saying “never.”
It’s you saying, “not in this 90-day window, on purpose.”
Step 4: Turn Ideas into Actual, Scheduled Work
For your Primary Flight, define:
Clear outcome (What will be done by 90 days from now?)
Key milestones (3–5 big checkpoints)
Realistic time blocks on your calendar
If it doesn’t show up on your calendar, it’s not a priority. It’s a wish.
For your Supporting Projects, give them:
A narrower scope (What’s the smallest version that would still be meaningful?)
A lighter cadence (maybe one session per week)
Step 5: Create a “Turbulence Rule” for New Ideas
You’re a visionary. You’re going to have more ideas next week. And the week after that.
To keep them from blowing up your runway, set one simple rule:
“New ideas go in the Idea Hangar. I review and re-prioritize once a month.”
If something truly can’t wait (legal, values, or safety-related), of course, you address it.
But “ooh this would be fun” is not an emergency.
Step 6: Review Monthly, Not Daily
Once a month:
Re-score your top ideas
Check progress on your Primary Flight
Decide: continue, adjust, or swap
That’s it. You went from “too many ideas” to a repeatable system.
And if you want a co-pilot to help you score, sort, and turn your next big idea into a 90-day flight plan instead of another half-built project, that’s literally what I do all day. Let’s chart your flight plan.
