Cut Your To Do List in Half

Well, hey friend, and welcome back to the Driven Woman Entrepreneur Podcast. This episode is about how to cut your to-do list in half. Now, I gotta apologize, I know the title is just a little bit clickbaity, but it got your attention, didn't it? And here's the thing, busy business owners, busy solopreneurs, all have something in common, they have a lot to do, they're wearing a lot of hats, and they all have far more things on their to-do list than they can possibly ever get to. But if you are finding that items stay on your to-do list for a long time, they get transferred from one day to the next, one week to the next, one month to the next, and the most important things just never seem to get crossed off or maybe even started then you know as well as I that true productivity does not mean getting more done.

It means getting the right things done, the most important things and right now there are a lot of content creators talking about the hustle culture and burnout because nobody works harder than a solopreneur who's doing all the things, and it is absolutely a recipe for burnout if we don't know how to be focusing on the right things, the most important things, the things that generate revenue, and that move our game piece forward. And chances are your to-do list is full of things that have nothing to do with those most important goals. So one of the things that I like to share with my clients is, do you know where your drive comes from, we can also call these things your drivers.

The reason why this is so important is because when we have so many things to do, when we have a long to-do list and every day we are starting another one that looks just as long, not knowing what actions we can take that shift us from park into drive, well, that's a hazard. That's a problem. It doesn't work for busy people to just wait for the motivation to kick in. Chances are that may not happen so knowing where your drive comes from, I think is crucial. And for most people, it's gonna fall in one of these four categories. Interest, challenge, novelty, or urgency and let me describe each of them. If you have an interest driver, it means that you are naturally gonna be drawn to, attracted to, and compelled to do things that spark your interest. But in a business, any business, it's not all interesting, is it?

So if we can automate some things that are boring to us, if we are an interest-based person, that's going to help us a lot. If we can plan to reach a point in our business where we can outsource all of the things or most of the things, or even some of the things that we are not interested in, that is going to help us be more productive. If you are a person who's primarily driven by challenge, that's good to know because if you're driven by challenge, you are going to need to put things in your business intentionally that challenge you. You're going to need to pay attention to your competitors because that can be a source of engaging your challenge driver. You're going to need to seek ways to be more efficient, to be more effective, to serve more people, to make more money, to generate more change in the world, because those are ways to engage your challenge driver.

Now, for a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly people like me who have ADHD, we tend to have a novelty driver. Now, this can be a really important thing to know about yourself because if you are primarily driven by novelty, you're going to need to include ways to bring novelty into your business without hijacking yourself. If you are largely driven by novelty, if you have a high need for novelty, that also means you have a low threshold for boredom and a low tolerance for boredom and how that may show up in your business is that you are constantly changing things. You're constantly trying out new tips and tricks and tools and tactics. You're constantly coming up with new offers. You're constantly changing your niche, and that is problematic because while it may stimulate the heck out of your novelty driver, you may be taking tons of action.

You may not actually be moving your game piece forward because all that change can be very confusing to the people that you're wanting to serve. They literally won't be able to keep up with what you're paying attention to and talking about now and next, and you've heard it said before, when you confuse, you lose. So if you have a novelty driver, you need to very intentionally insert ways to bring novelty into your business intentionally, strategically, and on purpose. Otherwise, you are going to be hijacked by every cool, shiny, sparkly new thing that hits the market. For example, if you have a novelty driver, you're probably obsessed with AI and chatGPT right now, am I right? In a few months, there'll be another new thing and you'll be off and running with that so we do need to understand where our drive comes from and bake that into our business so we don't get hijacked by it.

The fourth driver is urgency and unfortunately, when you don't know what drives you and you don't have it intentionally baked into your business, you will default to urgency, how that shows up in your business is that you are always going to be putting out fires. You are always going to be caving into client demands. You are always going to be breathing down the neck of whatever deadlines are in your way. Now, a lot of people who do client work say the only way they can get things done is by having a deadline, but what if you have four or five or 50 or 60 different customers or clients that you're doing work for. With all of those different deadlines, creating a sense of urgency, it would be like having an emergency room with one doctor and no nurses and 50 people who just got in a huge accident coming through the door. We have to find ways to manage these drivers because otherwise, I promise you, your to-do list is going to be full of things that are not moving your business forward.

Something else I talk about with my clients and I think is really helpful, I actually do an assessment with my clients to find out which of these four tendencies there are, but most of you are obligers. This is important to know because if you're an obliger, you're most likely looking at a to-do list that is full of things that other people expect from you hit the pause button and go take a look at your to-do list right now and then tell me if that's so or not. 42% of all people are obligers, so they are the majority but when you're an obliger, you have been saying yes to what everyone else wants of you, expects from you would prefer you to do or simply asked for. And if your to-do list is full of things that you feel obligated to do for others, I promise you, your most important goals are never going to get checked off. In fact, they may not even make it to the list because when we feel obligated to do so many things for so many people, both paid and unpaid, because these tendencies show up in your business and pretty much everywhere else in your life, if you are an obliger and your to-do list is full of things you're doing for other people.

You're probably at some point not even gonna put your most important goals on the list because it just becomes too painful seeing it there and knowing not only is it not getting done, it's actually not getting started. And here's the thing, there's no blame and no shame in this game like how you got here is not your fault. How you got here is because you're a nice person, you tend to say yes a lot. I call that the default Yes, yes is everybody's favorite answer. Yes is easy for us, and it's easy for them. It makes people like us. It relieves their stress because as soon as they ask if we can do something and we say yes, they've just transferred that stress from them to us, and most of the time it is the easiest, quickest, fastest answer that we get so accustomed to giving, we probably don't even think of ourselves as a people pleaser, but yet if we look at our to-do list, the evidence is right there, we have a default Yes problem.

You know what else is true about people like us, we are driven by curiosity and novelty. So when someone asks us to do something, if it sounds like fun or different or something we haven't done before or we're just the least bit curious about it, we're going to say yes because we enjoy solving problems. In fact, being a creative problem solver is a wonderful trait to have but if you don't manage it by some of the ways I'm gonna be talking about in this short no BS episode, you will always be using up your time, energy, focus and effort solving problems that have nothing to do with you moving your business forward. You see, being a creative problem solver is going to make you very popular. Because not everybody's a creative problem solver like if you are the kind of person who has the default, yes, and you're curiosity driven and you're a creative problem solver, there will be no shortage of problems that other people have that they want you to help them solve or just hand it off to you.

Not even help them with, just take it from them, and that is probably in a way, very satisfying for you. One of the situations that I work on most frequently with my clients is how to reverse engineer how they show up in their business and in some respects in their life. Because solving other people's problems, and unless that is your business model and you are being well paid for it, is ultimately going to use up your time, your energy, and frankly your bandwidth. So that your business is not going to get the best of you, it's going to get what's left of you, and that can be a hard situation to face. So if you have too many things on your to-do list on the regular, I guran-fucking tee it. You are doing too much for others and not making a firm enough commitment to doing the things that are most important for you.

Another tool I use with my coaching clients is the Eisenhower Matrix. Now, if you've ever not experienced it or haven't heard of it, the Eisenhower Matrix is a decision making tool that has two axes. There's urgent and there's important, so there's four quadrants. In one quadrant, you put the things that you're going to delete, you're literally going to take these things off your to-do list. This is one of the hardest things that I find for people to do because while they hire me, because they want help streamlining their business and they are working too much and they're not earning enough and they're doing too many things, when we start identifying things that they can actually delete. They will argue for why they can't do that.

It's just human nature and I do the same but there are things on your to-do list that should be deleted. I promise you, I don't have to know you personally to know that because after being a the therapist for 20 something years and a coach for the last seven, I know a thing or two about human nature and I definitely know a thing or two about entrepreneurs. We feel a tremendous sense of responsibility for anything that shows up on our to-do list. But as we get better at making decisions about how we use our time and talent, what I experience is that fewer things make it onto your list in the future, but if they're there now, some of them need to be deleted.

There are other things that will show up on the Eisenhower Matrix in the delegate matrix in the delegate quadrant. So delegate means you are not going to do it, but someone else is, maybe someone that's currently working with you, or for you, it may be a contractor, it may be a gig worker, it may be an assistant, it might be an employee, but you are doing tasks right now that you should not be doing, not because they should be deleted those are the ones that don't need to be done by you or anyone but delegated meaning done by someone, not by you. This is also challenging for a lot of solopreneurs, and they will tell me they can't afford to hire help or no one is going to do it as well as them. And I have given all of those reasons aka excuses in the past and all it did was hold me back.

The third part of the matrix, the third quadrant is defer means it's gonna be done, it's gonna be done by you but not now. It's gonna be done later and if you're anything like me, one of the issues that you have, that means your to-do list is always overly filled, is that time is elastic for you. Some people call it time blindness, I tend to call it time optimism. We have a very interesting relationship with time because we either don't think we have enough, so we don't start something, or we think we have more than we do, so we don't finish something and because we don't know how to estimate how much time something actually takes, we keep adding things to the list and we have no business doing so.

But as you start learning how to manage your time better, you learn how to get better at deciding what you commit to. What you actually say yes to intentionally instead of the knee jerk reflex default yes, you will see fewer items on the defer list, but they will be there and that's totally fine especially if you are a creative person and you keep coming up with new ideas. I am an ideator, I am constantly coming up with ideas, and while I love being this way, it's also kind of annoying. Let me be honest, because as soon as I have an idea, I wanna do it and most of the time it has to be put in the defer pile because I've already committed to other important things that I need to do first. So you do get better at this over time, can be a little hard in the beginning, but learning what you need to defer means you don't have to force yourself to do something now when you really need to do it later.

And the fourth quadrant is due, and those are the things that actually belong on your to-do list. So one of the ways I help my clients with the Eisenhower Matrix is take their long ass to-do list. It looks like a roll of toilet paper if it's analog, because it's so long, it doesn't all fit on one paper. I've seen people who've taped several 8.5 x 11 pieces of paper together, and of course most of us now are using digital tools, so the list goes on and on and on and on over several pages. But I promise you your to-do list contains all four of these categories. The do, the defer, the delegate, and the delete. It's just that they're all mixed up in there together. And when you don't have a system for identifying the urgent from the non-urgent, the important from the non-important, it's really, really hard to manage a to-do list. You probably don't even wanna look at it once you've created it, because it can be a source of guilt and shame.

And what most of my clients tell me is, yeah, but everything seems urgent and important, and I know because you're a responsible person and an obliger who has a default yes and a creative problem solver, you believe once it's on your list, you absolutely have to do it. So, being able to cut your to-do list in half. We're not just talking about looking at the list and randomly crossing things out or putting a blindfold on and randomly crossing them out, or eenie mini miny moe crossing them out. We're talking about creating a decision making system that actually determines what ends up on that list to begin with so that you're not just using up your energy and your time, you're actually moving forward. That is what creates a sustainable and frankly, a satisfying business because what we don't do very well and we need to learn to do is to protect our drive, our passion, and our focus.

And doing things that other people are asking of you doing things because they seem fun or novel, or because they feel urgent. While it might feel satisfying in the moment, over time, it is unsustainable. If you are a brand new business owner, it's possible that you haven't learned this yet from experience, but if you have been in business for yourself for several years, this is probably resonating with you real hard. What I suggest and what I teach my clients is there are other filters to apply. Yes, we need to know where our drive comes from so that we can build that into our business, but also knowing where our drive comes from helps us understand where we are vulnerable to getting hijacked by things that we really should not be doing. So the filters that I recommend instead, instead of just default yessing ourself into an overly full to-do list, that we then feel obligated to do everything.

But everything seems equally urgent and important so we either don't do any of it, or we cross a few things off, or we do the lowest hanging fruit, or we do the things that people are blowing up our inbox over, and that is not the way to be successful. Trust me, I spent years exhausting myself and really using up my bandwidth, but not moving the needle forward. The filters I now use and I teach my private coaching clients and I'm recommending to you are these, identify your most important goals. I have heard from several of my clients that their most important goal is they want to retire their husband. They want to be able to make enough money in their business that their husband can retire from his job. That's a wonderful goal. I have had other clients who say I want to triple my income within the next two to three years because I want to take my parents on a wonderful trip for their 30th anniversary. These are high level goals.

A high level goal for you might be going from one-on-one work to one to many work, so that you can dramatically extend your impact as well as your income. It could be that you want to publish a book. There's no end to the possible goals you might have, but you have to know what your most important goals are because then you know what it's costing you to use up your time, energy, focus, and effort doing anything but. You also need to know, I believe, your core values because if your core values are not built into your business, if you are not making decisions about what services to offer, what clients to work with, what marketing strategies you use, what you say no to based on your values. You're probably saying yes to the wrong things. It's always been fascinating to me how few people actually have taken the time to know what is most important to them but when you ask them to ask themselves, it's not hard to figure out it's one of the exercises I do with every new client.

In fact, it's one of the first exercises we do because if they wanna transform their business, we are absolutely going to bake their core values into the new business that they're transforming it into. You also need to know what fills your cup. This is a little bit different than your core values and your drivers, but what nurtures your soul? What makes you feel like your business is worth getting up and doing day after day, year after year, even during the hard times? Some people would refer to that as knowing your why I think this is incredibly important. But what's also important is not burdening your business with the responsibility of being everything to you, the business equivalent of a soulmate. That's not realistic, it's not necessary, and it's not sustainable.

As a matter of fact, coming up in the not too distant future, I'm going to be interviewing someone on how to make your business boring on purpose. I'm not gonna give any more away about it now, but I'm really excited about this interview because sometimes our business is effortful because we've made it that way. Because we are expecting our business to fulfill us, to satisfy us, to nurture us, to financially support us, to entertain us, to make us proud of ourselves, to give us a voice. Whoa, that is way too much of a burden for our business. So the notion of making your business boring is to strip away all those expectations so that you can get those needs met in other areas of your life. And the last thing I think you need to know is what is your actual energetic bandwidth?

So many people end up hustling their way to burnout, not hustling their way to success, which is what they think they're going to do. They hustle their way to burnout because they either don't know what their energetic bandwidth is, or they are simply not making decisions that respect it and take it into account. I was recently on a coaching call with one of my clients who said, I have about four hours a day of high quality creative energy after that, I'm done. Now you're probably not gonna get a job proclaiming that because in the capitalist workplace, the idea is you gotta put in at least eight hours. That's considered full-time but what we don't often talk about is the fact that with all the unnecessary and redundant meetings with all of the chitchat, with all of the breaks, with all of the useless emails that are reply all and circulated to people who really don't need to be reading them let's be honest.

Most people are only doing three and a half to four hours of work in the workplace, so four hours as your energetic bandwidth that's really good to know. Because if it is four hours and maybe it's less than that, then you absolutely need to use your time wisely and not let anything show up on that to-do list that isn't high quality stuff. And if you don't actually have the answers to these things, your most important goals, what drives you, your core values, your revenue and profit needs, what fills your cup, your actual energetic bandwidth. There's no reason to be ashamed, chances are no one's ever asked you and you didn't understand how important it was to ask yourself. But I'm inviting you to get honest with yourself about the what, the how, and the why of your business, and that involves stripping away all of the advice that you have been given, whether free or paid for that doesn't serve you, yhat no longer serves you, that you've outgrown that doesn't fit your personality or what motivates you or simply requires things of you that are outside your energetic bandwidth.

Just identify those things so that you can start to let them go because if your to-do list always seems to get longer, never shorter and you keep putting things off to the next day, the next week, the next month, the next year, or simply taking them off your list altogether because you can't stand the sight of them knowing you're not going to do them anymore then my friend, you are filling your days with tasks that may be easy to check off, but don't move the needle. They may also not be easy to check off. These are habits and belief systems, and they can be hard to break because we don't know how to change our priorities or because we have doubt or guilt or fear about it. But the reality is this, there are simple tactics that you can learn and implement that will move the needle.

I'm gonna give you a couple right now. Reduce how often you check your social media or email or both. Revise your client agreement so that the scope of work is better defined and the cost associated with doing anything outside the scope is also identified. Adjusting your prices may be what you need to do next. You don't have to do something indefinitely if it no longer serves you. But what so many people do is clinging to what's familiar no matter how much they hate it, or they don't have a plan for how to move forward. You need to get quiet with yourself inside and outside to find those answers. And for some of you, you might need a second pair of eyes and ears on your business because as I've said before, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar.

So if you're ready to untangle the knot and you'd like to do it with me, might choose your own adventure VIP day or four week intensive would be a great way to figure it out this summer. So that you can turn things around for the second half of the year in a lot less time than you might have guessed. The link is in the show notes but whether it's the right time for us to work together or not, please take some time this summer to identify some of the things I've talked about in this episode and begin to make a list of what you're going to do, so that your to-do list can become a to done list.