How to choose where to focus when your to-do list is overflowing

When it comes to running your online business, you'll have short-term, urgent “I need to do now” tasks, as well as long-term “I need to prepare for my future growth” tasks. But with so many short-term and long-term tasks on your to-do list, how do you know where to start? In today's episode, I have a few strategies that will give you clarity about what to do and when.

– How gaining clarity on where your business is heading will help you to hone your focus on what you *really* need to do and when.
– Why understanding your short-term and long-term gain tasks will change your priorities and the way you manage your time.
– The benefits of using task management software to capture everything you need to do to keep your business running.
– Using my “Escape the Messy Middle” workbook to understand what projects you need to plan and execute to move your business forward.
– How being realistic with your to-do list will help you to prioritise your tasks and be more productive.

 

How to choose where to focus your time and energy in your business when your to-do list is overflowing. 

This is something that pretty much every business owner is going to experience at some point in time in running their business and I know it can be so incredibly challenging when you feel like you are being pulled in a million different directions in your business and you just don't know where to focus next.

 

The concept of short-term gain versus long-term gain tasks. 

So the very first thing I want to talk about before we really jump into how to focus or where to place your focus in your business is this concept of short-term gain versus long-term gain tasks. 

Now, running your business is a little bit like gardening. 

So short-term tasks are the things like watering and weeding the garden. You have to water your plants every day, otherwise, they die, right? Otherwise, the weeds will take over, and this is like dealing with the day-to-day operations, your emails, client needs, all of the things that keep.

The lights on in your business, the things that are working in your business versus the things that deliver a long-term gain. Things like planting new seeds, fertilising your plants, and pruning them, you don't necessarily see the immediate results and they don't feel as urgent. But if you skip these things, then your garden won't grow.

These are things like creating a course so you don't have to work with clients as much. Long-term, designing a new lead magnet to grow your email list, starting a podcast to attract more of the right people into your business, and the tasks that are working on the business. But when your to-do list is overflowing, it can feel really hard to create time for those longer-term tasks when you don't even feel like you have time to stay on top of the short-term things.

And one of the biggest mistakes that I see business owners making is spending all of their time on short-term tasks that feel urgent or feel important, and not making any time for the things that will actually move their business forward, not just keep the lights on and keep the business running as it is.

But that's easier said than done, right? Like how do you choose where to focus when there are just so many things you could focus on at any given point in time? 

So here are sort of rough five steps that I would take. 

 

Step #1: I would get really clear on where my business is heading. 

Often we can get caught in just running the business and you just end up pedaling this bicycle with no real idea of where you're going or what you need to do to get there.

And if you don't know where you are going, you're not going to wind up anywhere in particular, or you're going to wind up somewhere that's completely different from where you want to be. 

 

Step #2: Capture everything that needs to be done to keep your business running.

So write down all of those short-term gain tasks, all of the things that need to be done to keep your clients happy, to keep the lights on in your business, and write them down, whether it's a physical planner or a digital task management software like Click up. And then ask yourself, do I really need to do this task? Is this task moving me closer to my bigger vision for my business? Or is it actually just taking off my time? 

A lot of the time, we can fill our to-do lists with things that make us feel busy, make us feel productive, but don't move our businesses any closer to where we want to be and that we don't really want to be doing. So ask yourself, do I want to be doing this task?

 

Step #3: What bigger projects need to happen to move your business closer toward that long-term goal? 

Once you've figured out those exercises, you should then have a rough idea of what needs to happen to achieve that bigger vision, right? Whether that's launching a podcast or finally creating that membership or building out that funnel to fill your coaching program, whatever it is, these are all big projects and you might feel like you want to do them all at the same time, but you're actually a lot more effective if you just focus on one at a time rather than constantly switching between all of these different things, dive headfirst into one, complete that, then do the next one. 

And I know it's so hard, like with that entrepreneurial brain, I get this as well. We want to do all of the things and we want to do them yesterday. But sometimes slow and steady is the easiest way to get to the finish line.

So pick which one you need to focus on first, pick which project you need to focus on, or which project you want to focus on first, and start with that one. 

 

Step #4: What needs to happen to make this first big project a reality? 

This is where you want to capture all of the tasks that need to be done and put them side by side with wherever you captured those other tasks that you needed to keep the lights on. So if you are putting them in all in click up, keep it all in click up and remember these tasks that you are putting in to make this bigger project a reality, they aren't going to feel as urgent as the others that keep the lights on in your business.

So rather than relying on the urgency to make these things happen, you are going to need to be intentional with how you prioritise them rather than just working on them when you have time. 

You'll need to make time to get these done. And this might look like getting up an hour earlier every day or skipping Netflix at night or setting a boundary around how often you check your inbox every day.

And then using that little bit of extra time to work on your business instead of just constantly being available in your inbox and being really reactive with what you are doing. 

 

Step #5: Be realistic with your daily to-do list.

This is hard. How often do you actually complete everything that is on your to-do list? If you are an overachiever, you probably overestimate how much you can get done in a day. I do this too. And then when you roll your to-do list, the leftover tasks on your to-do list over onto the next day, you feel like you're behind. You feel like you haven't been as productive as you should have been. You guilt yourself about it. 

And then you end up constantly carrying over these tasks and never actually ticking off the entire to-do list. 

So instead of trying to do everything, how can you try to do less, but only do the things that are really important? Time blocking has been a really great tool for me, for being realistic with how much I can get done in a day, because I will put in my calendar how long I think it's going to take me to do something, and then I realise, oh, I'm trying to like budget 10 hours worth of work here, and I'm only going to work four or five hours today, so there's no way I'm going to get this done.

 

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