Drowning in Your To-Do List? Here's How to Reset and Reclaim Your Time
Back to reality this week, and with everything I’m about to talk about in this post, it will help me for next week as well. Why?
Next Thursday is what I like to call, National Holiday. Basically a day my Uncle made up so we can take Thursday off to watch the Lions play and have a few…beverages!
Not to mention my nephew is in town next weekend playing hockey, it’ll be a 4-day weekend for me after just a 3-day work week next week.
So how will I get all my work done?
Stay tuned!
The Wednesday Reset That Saved My Productivity
One of the things I found when it comes to visiting my girlfriend in Hamilton, especially with the longer visits instead of a couple of days during the weekend, my visits are turning into five and six day visits with me going up to Hamilton on the Thursday as a travel day and then coming home either on the following Monday or even the Tuesday like I just did recently.
With that, I prefer planning ahead and creating content ahead of time, so I don’t have to work while I’m visiting my girlfriend. I prefer my time spent on her and the kids and not on work. As hard as I try though, there is always work to be done, but the primary focus is on my girlfriend.
With trying to create all of this content, getting a couple of weeks ahead, I found myself getting a little overwhelmed and even to the point I was getting close to being burnt out.
Now, having the systems I have, it wasn’t too bad because everything was already plotted out in Notion, in all of my planning templates. But I needed to take a step back, refocus my week, and on the Wednesday, I physically wrote down everything I needed to get done. Creating content for this many weeks, needing to create this many posts, this many videos, this many scripts and so on and so forth.
Once I did all of that, replanned and redid my time blocking, the rest of the week and the few days leading up before I left to go visit my girlfriend the last time were so much smoother.
Just a simple stop, take a breath, reset, and move forward with creating all the work I needed to get done.
Why Your Hardest Task Should Always Come First
When it came to creating my To-Do Lists, I found I had stopped using the Eat The Frog method for a short time and just now getting back into it.
What this is, is you take your entire To-Do list, something I do in the morning, and I write out my tasks. Over the last couple of months, I was writing out my tasks and kind of using Eat The Frog in the morning, but I found I was jumping to tasks that were scheduled later in the day, batching different content, and it kind of threw out the Eat The Frog method. The week before I went to see my girlfriend, using the Eat The Frog method religiously, I noticed my days were a lot shorter, and I was getting a lot more done.
Here’s what you need to do, every morning, write out your task list, what you need to get done. Take the biggest, hardest task and put that first. And then your next biggest task, and then your next biggest task. That first big hard task is the “Frog”. Once you “Eat” or finish that task, you move on to the next. In short, you’re going to take your task list and break it down to the top “Frogs”, your 3 hardest tasks, and work from there.
You can also use the method from the book, Make Time, and take a highlighted task from your day. It doesn’t have to be your “Frog”, your biggest task, but take a highlight, something that you want to get done, something that might be fun and enjoyable to do. So once you get your hard task done, then you can move on to say a highlight. And then your next frog, and so on and so forth. For me, I found that worked so much better, and I got a lot more done.
Gary Vee's $1.80 Strategy: The Engagement Hack That Actually Works
Yet again, a conversation I recently had, was on going out and engaging on social media.
People were finding they weren’t getting the engagement they had wanted, and they didn’t know why.
My first question was, are you posting or scheduling your content and then forgetting about it? If you post and ghost, you’re not going to get as much engagement as you would like. So I told them, while you time block for the following week, actually block time to engage on social media.
Now we all doom scroll, don’t lie to yourself. We all sit there for how many hours a day and scroll social media, whether that be Reels, Shorts, TikTok’s, or whatever the case may be.
Now, while you’re doing that, focus on your niche. Who is your target audience? Who are you creating content for? Get in there and follow creators, and then comment on different topics that you love. If you’re creating content about Samsung devices or Samsung tips, follow the hashtag or the topic Samsung tips. Go out and engage on 10, 15, 20, even 30 of those videos.
The more you comment, the more people will see your commenting and want to check out your content. Now, I’m not going to comment on posts about baking because I don’t create content around baking, because let’s be real, I can’t bake. But, I will comment on creating content about Samsung tips, about social media tips, about productivity tips. I will stick to those niches, and then that in turn will get more eyes on my videos, on my posts, whatever the case may be.
This Week's Quote
By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.
