One "To Do List" - Just isn't enough!
I have been Life / Work Balance coaching a client over the past couple of weeks, who is a young single mother that has taken the significant step to set up her own “micro business” over the past 12 months. This motivated and talented lady has done all the right business things along the way and is motivated with a great attention to detail.
However in recent months when she looks at her ever increasing To Do List, becomes quite overwhelmed at the enormity of what she is juggling in all areas of her life and bouts of anxiety, see her simply not knowing where to start and the dreaded curse of procrastination starts to de-rail her life.
When I first looked at her To Do List, yes all 45 items on it, I noticed that it had everything on it, covering all areas of her life …. It had client action items, doing invoicing and BAS, marketing and website design, through to parenting items, social engagements, and to top it off a reminder to do her grocery shopping list. Now whilst some would say that was being super organised …. even I looked at it and was a bit overwhelmed with the enormity of what had to be done.
So using one of the core principles of The System of Structure, we needed to simply break down the enormity of the massive To Do List into manageable chunks.
And how did we do that?
We created five … yes five …. To Do Lists as follows, in no specific order:
Clients (case prep / research and consults)
Work on the business (marketing and business development)
Work in the business (accounting, invoicing admin)
Family
“Me”
I know it sounds obvious, but now each To Do List doesn’t have any more than about 8 or 9 items on it, so when looking at a list on its own, all of a sudden life is significantly more manageable and nowhere near as overwhelming.
Who would have thought going from one To Do List to five To Do Lists would actually relieve stress, lower anxiety and motivate someone even more? ..... “yet the same 45 items are still there to do” I hear you say ? …. Yes they are.
This only works in conjunction with one of the other core principles of the “System of Structure” and that is to simply “spin one plate at a time”
