How to break up with the ‘nice to do’ on your to do list

Today’s topic: breaking up with your nice to-do tasks. Sounds great, but why would you want to do that, anyhow?

Well, often when we are trying to get ahead of our to-dos, we put our head down and to go through the list, and doing that results in a feeling of being depleted. Or, perhaps there are feelings of working a lot and not getting anywhere. It’s very demotivational. These things are un-fun – and as a result, we procrastinate and we get distracted. All of the things that we believe are the problem (being distracted, not focused and so on) are actually because we are not engaged in what we’re doing

We believe we have to/ should be doing them – and they feel really, really ridiculously heavy. Let’s focus on releasing some of this weight, so that we feel happy, we feel strong, we feel light, & we feel expansive. If you go to the Productivity Success Cake, a lot of that (feeling of strong/light/expansive) is baked into the health layer and into the environment layer. However, what I’m going to focus on today is the productivity layer. 

In the productivity layer we have a piece called ‘Time and Tasks. In this is “breaking up with your nice to-do tasks”. Those tasks can be significant and we all have them!  For example, periodically I go through and I empty out bins of pages of ‘someday I’ll get to this,’ you know, beautiful ideas. Maybe you’ve got ideas from programs that you attended that ‘someday I’ll do this and the truth is that all of that physical clutter or clutter on your computer, it’s adding to your mental angst and you’re not getting to it anyway. So you just want to release it and break up with it. Not easy though, is it? So I’m going to tell you a little story about how a client of mine and I – we did just that.

Read on or watch the video.

I have a client and the tasks were on this person’s computer.  They were all nice and neat and assigned to this person, with a deadline.  We started by talking about deleting those tasks which were over a certain age – for example, they were 6 months overdue – but that didn’t seem right. So we considered deleting anything over a year (because if you have not done them in a year and nobody’s died, you can get rid of them), and most of them were able to be deleted. I was really curious why we could not just get rid of the rest. We discovered there were some deeply held beliefs around responsibility, and perhaps some worthiness. Also, the lack of global deleting had to do with how this person’s company was set up. The tasks that were assigned to this person should have been assigned to somebody else – but the ‘somebody else’ was not holding up their end of the bargain, and therefore, it didn’t get actioned.

So it’s kind of two- or three-pronged. It’s all about considering how much you take on, how much really is YOUR job and how much the needle moves.  

There were other tasks that were more ‘nice to-dos.’ For example – the head chatter may say, “Well, I should really do research for that client because if I did, it would make that client’s experience better in my line of work”. And that’s not untrue. However, it’s a little bit like my bins of ideas of things that I’d like to do someday in my practice (because most people I know that are creative geniuses like myself we’re always going to take a new personality exam etc…we want to learn more).  The truth of the matter is that there’s only so much time in the day and there’s only so much of us. So we must make choices. Concentrate on the things that you are not only just able to do, but that will really move the needle. 

I did a Facebook live in UnscatterMe, my online Facebook community (which I recommend that you consider joining!) and what I talked about in that community earlier today was how to prioritize. Breaking up with your ‘nice to dos’ is one way of prioritizing. Head over to the group and watch the video to see what that looks like. 

When you look at your to-dos in that piece of the cake, that time and task to-dos, if there is anything that’s a to-do of more than six months, really seriously ask yourself, is it that important? If it is, think about how you will shift your priorities to get it done. If it’s not that important, put it in a to-do list for next year, next quarter, next month, so that it’s not in your face, holding you down, weighing you down, not allowing you to be productive, not allowing you to live in your greatness, not allowing you to feel unscattered so that you can live your best, most confident, happy, entrepreneurial life that you deserve, so that you can actually do the work that you came into this world to do.