How To Control A Massive To-Do List

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I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like I have 10,000 balls up in the air, whilst conducting an orchestra of wasps in the middle of a hurricane…

We all let our to-do lists get the better of us from time to time. 

In this article I am going to share with you some strategies that I have used to get my to-do list under control, remove the overwhelm, and systemise my tasks to prevent future chaos from the same tasks currently clogging it up.

If you’d like to get your own business and tasks under control, swipe over 70 of my daily business task instructions and my whole Trello Board here: www.sarahcordiner.com/control

No Dollar, No List

When I have a massive list of stuff that needs doing, I personally prioritise my tasks like this:

1. Will it IMMEDIATELY make me money if I do this now?  If the answer is yes, I do that FIRST
2. Will this get a client contract or job (that is ALREADY paying me) finished? If the answer is yes, I do that second. 
3. Will it make me money in the short term if I do this now? If the answer is yes, I do that next.
4. Will it make me money in the long term future (not instantly).  If the answer is yes, I leave it for later.
5. Will this make me money at all?  If the answer is no, delete it completely. 

What Is Your Time Worth?

Before we can start deciding what to remove from our list, we need to get an idea of how much time we are wasting in the form of money.

Write down what your hourly rate is (or would be) if you charge out yourself to clients.

Audit Your Time

For The next 2 weeks, write down absolutely EVERYTHING that you do through the day by 15 minute intervals.  Eg:

7am-7:15am: Scrolled facebook

7:15am-7:30am: Replied to emails

This will start to give you a really good idea about how your are spending your time and will be very enlightening for you.  Please do this – it will amaze you when you see it in black and white and make the next steps in this article much clearer for you.

Pick ONE Thing

Many of us get scared about picking one goal, as we think we will sacrifice other opportunities if we narrow our focus to one thing.  But trying to catch two rabbits often results in us catching none.

Pick ONE major goal for the year – one thing, that should you achieve it, will knock down every other dream or goal that you have in some way. 

Make sure that every single activity you have written on your to-do list directly aligns to achieving that particular goal.  If it doesn’t, delete it.

Sarah’s Hierarchy of Filtering Your Tasks

Now that you have your tasks lists, let’s see what we can take off of our burden, lighten the load and have you only focus on the high-value tasks.

Time to audit everything, measure it next to our ‘hourly rate’ to see if each task is worth our personal time doing, or if it is in fact more profitable to hire someone else to do it.

For instance, if you have decided that you want your annual turnover to be $500,000 a year, then you need to be earning $240 an hour.

So why would you spend 8 hours mucking around with trying to make some posters for your event (wasting $1,920 of your time), that would have cost you only $20 for a freelancer to do for you?

You Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Do Everything 

This next stage is about getting realistic with what you are putting your time into and how you are managing your tasks.

For every single task in your list, you are now going to ask yourself the following questions in this order:

1.    Can you ELIMINATE it? If yes, then delete it.  If not, move to the next stage.

2.    Can you AUTOMATE it?  If yes, set up the automation.  If not, move to the next stage.

3.    Can you OUTSOURCE it?  If yes, find your contractors.  If not, then move to the next stage.

4.    Can you DELEGATE it?  If yes, delegate it.  If not, then move to the next stage.

5.    Are you SURE that you are the ONLY person that can do this?  Are you absolutely POSITIVE that there is no other way of doing this?  If yes, then add it to your personal list.  If there is another way of doing it, do it the other way!

I will further extrapolate on each of these hierarchical stages now:

Eliminate

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The next stage of systemising your business model is to then look at everything you do to sell, produce and deliver your product or service and then decide what can be eliminated.  sometimes we have steps we do not need, or options we give our customers that just cause confusion, or resources that are not required – even tasks we do ourselves that are not really required. 

Delete everything and anything that is not absolutely critical to the process. 

Just get rid of it.

Automate

Automation has been huge in my ability to take on more customers, create more consistent customer experiences and ultimately scale my business.

By using automation tools such as online order forms, online quote request forms, online payment forms, a customer record management system, automated email sequences and a combination of online apps, I have been able to replace people – including myself – in many parts of my business in a way that has significantly improved my customer experience.

By using technology instead of people, you can remove inconsistent operations, ensure that business is being taken care of 24/7, never have to worry about holidays, weekends, sick days, bad moods, pay rises or international time zones – not to mention, massively reduce your overheads.

Outsource

You may have identified parts of your business that require human input, skill and talent. 

But before defaulting to ‘if I want it done properly, then I should do it myself’; or ‘Oh no, now I have to train people in something I’m not amazing at myself’, first consider outsourcing.

There are freelancers, contractors, small businesses and companies who specialise in every type of skill you could imagine. 

People who have dedicated their entire lives, education, professions and business resources to that thing you need done and if you look around hard enough you will find people willing to work on an ‘as needs basis’, meaning that you get professional work done without the stress or the overheads.

Outsourcing means sending it to somebody else to do.

There are lots of ways to outsource. 

The cheapest ways are to find freelancers on sites such as Upwork.com, where people from every industry you could imagine, with every skill you could wish for, are there to offer you their services as required. 

You post your ‘job’ with a full description and a budget, and freelancers will bid against one another to get your post. 

You can also outsource to other businesses who may specialise their entire suite of services around that one thing that you need.

Outsourcing can be hard to find the right people and takes a little getting used to.  Like any form of ‘employment’, outsourcing requires you to know precisely what you want first, and then to implement a process of selection, onboarding and offboarding.

If you’re thinking ‘but i can’t afford it!;, remember how much you cost per hour.  I bet the money you are losing by doing it yourself is far more expensive than it would cost to get a contractor to do it, whilst you focus on income-generating and client-facing work. 

Start Small and Slow

Get freelancers to first do a trial job for you and get more than one to do the trial – pay them for the trial.  Base their skills on what they show you that they can do, not on what they say that they can do.

Secondly, when it comes to finding ‘experts’, make sure you check out a few things before you get fooled by any false claims.

• Experts have at least 5 years demonstrable experience in their area of expertise and can back that up with historical evidence, customer testimonials, a portfolio of work, published work. 
• They have qualifications and formal training in their area of expertise. 
• These days it’s also worth looking for a website and social media presence – if they can’t afford it or can’t be bothered with it, it tells me a lot about how seriously they take their business – and their customers’ business.

What Not To Outsource

Outsourcing has certainly changed my business, but make sure you do it in the right places with the right people.

Things I do NOT outsource are my social media (excluding advertising), or content creating such as blogs, books and courses – courses because that is my own area of expertise, but the others because these are your ‘voice’. 

The way you speak, write and communicate say everything about who you are and can only be uniquely you. 

Nobody else can capture your essence other than you. 

So my personal advice is that if you don’t like writing, don’t outsource it, instead learn how to get comfortable on camera and do videos that you can later get transcribed and edited by an outsourcer; or do audio recordings or use the Google Voice Recording tool to dictate out your written content through speech. 

But don’t ever give someone else the power to take your voice and your most powerful relationship building tool from you.

It is your voice that will attract those most like you, and therefore the ‘perfect match’ customers for your personality and style. 

Get someone else to ‘speak’ for you, and you’ll be attracting people that connect with ‘their’ voice, not yours – and that is not a good thing.

Believe in yourself, you are capable of learning every skill in the world.

However, for everything else – find a good collection of people who can do it for you.

Your life will never be the same when you master outsourcing, but ease into it with the same level of caution that you’d apply to employing a full time legal employee so that you don’t make any rash decisions on the wrong partners.

Delegate

Sometimes outsourcing is not an option. 

There could be an onsite requirement, a multidisciplinary team that need to be together or privacy and security issues that require an on-location, employee based delivery. 

In which case, before taking on any tasks yourself, first see if you can delegate it to someone else. 

If it is something that will need to be done more than once ever again in the foreseeable existence of your life, then take the time to write up some epic instructions for the task or role, and then take someone on and give them the opportunity to do their life’s best work through some good training.

ACTIVITY: Finalising Your Systems

Now that you understand each of the actions that you can apply to deal with each task, go back to your list of tasks and finish your ‘Task Audit’ that you started earlier in this section.

Make another column in your tasks list (processes and procedures list) against every item on your list and write one of the following letters based on what you can do with that task:

E: Eliminate

A: Automate

O: Outsource

D: Delegate

K: Keep Doing

Keep Doing

The final stage of the task filtering hierarchy, is the ‘keep doing’ stage.

This method may only be used if there is absolutely no way whatsoever that it can be done in any other of the ways listed in the previous stages.

This is stuff that only you can do, such as high level strategy planning, the ‘you’ specific client consults or flagship IP courses, workshops and public speaking.  

It could be writing your blog posts, writing books, filming your educational videos and sales videos as the ‘face’ of your business.  

Of course these are not the only things that could fall under you, but make sure that there really is no way that this could not be replicated.  Even sales calls can be outsourced.

When items fall into this stage of ‘you need to do it yourself’, then make sure that you are charging for it accordingly.

This is the highest end of the spectrum in my pricing model as you are exchanging your personal time as ‘done with you’ or ‘done for you’ and thus are top of the price range.

Remember your hourly rate?  This better be that, but multiplied by a lot.

Conclusion

If you are to be successful and scale your business, it is essential that you streamline, automate and eliminate everything that will hold you back.

Too many of us entrepreneurs and course creators waste our precious and highly valuable time on things that we really shouldn’t be doing.

Be BRUTAL with what you spend your time on – focussing only on income generating tasks that align to your ONE goal.

I hope you found this useful!

And if you’d like to get your own business and tasks under control, swipe over 70 of my daily business task instructions and my whole Trello Board here: www.sarahcordiner.com/control

Sarah x