MBA1841 Get Your To Do List Done With Less Anxiety

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Hey Yo. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business truths delivered on the daily every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And in today's episode you will learn how to get your to do list done with less anxiety. As entrepreneurs we are constantly working. We're constantly trying to get things done. A common productivity hack is to have a To do list whether it's digital or physical. But often getting through that to do list causes many of us lots of negative feelings. Anxiety, worry, feeling that you're not doing enough. Do you often feel disappointed that you didn't get enough done today or worried you're going to not finish everything by the end of the week? Well, in today's lesson I'm going to ease the pain a little bit. I'm going to show you a strategy that I use to help make sure I get everything that's important done. On my to do list. I feel a sense of accomplishment and I don't feel overwhelmed or a sense of anxiety. It took me some time to come up with the strategy. I did a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error. But it's been working for me for a few years now and I want to share it with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Today's lesson might be the most helpful thing you'll hear all week. So listen up. I found this very useful, and you might too. Getting through your to do list can be anxiety inducing. It could make you feel like, oh man, I got lots to do. Am I going to get it all done? Can't even predict how much you can get done in a given week. So I'm going to give you a strategy that has helped me so, so much with my to do lists. The first thing you need to do is you need to figure out how many hours a week are you working on your business. So I work full time on my business. I work about 10 hours a day.

That's 50 hours a week.

That number might be different for you. You might be doing this part time, might be a side hustle, might be 20 hours. Just figure out how many hours are you working on your business every week. And if you don't know, just track how many hours you're working this week. Once you know that number, that's going to be a very key number. Why? Because it's going to really allow us to get what's important done in the time allotted. So what I like to do is at the end of the week, on Friday afternoon, when things are a little slow for me, I write down my to do list for the entire next week. All the things I need to get done, I literally write them down in a legal pad. I then give my tasks. All the little tasks I wrote down. Let's say I wrote down 17 tasks. Okay, I give each one a score. I give it a number, a number from 1 to 5. 5, meaning this is gonna take a lot of time, approximately five hours to finish this one task. One, meaning it's a quick thing. I could do it in an hour or less. So I will go down the line and give each one a score. I'll then add up these scores. So like say, for example, my first task is ranked a two and my second task is ranked a five. And my third task is ranked a three. That's 10 points. Okay, I can only use up 25 points. 25 hours, okay? So if I go overboard, if I tally up my number and it's over 25, I have to choose something to cut. What is the least important thing on that list? I will have to move to the following week. Now you might be saying, hey Omar, why 25? I thought you said you had 50 hours a week. Well, a couple of reasons. Number one, this is my to do list. Today, on Friday, the week before, there's going to be some things that will creep up, things that will come throughout the week that I'll have to do. There are also regular tasks I have to do, like meetings or calls or checking email, okay? So I only want to take half my time on all that stuff. And the other half is actual to do's and it allows me to make sure I don't go overboard. So once I boil down to the tasks that equal 25 points in 25 hours, I then this is not the end of the task. I then take all those tasks. Let's say for example, I whittle down my to do list to 12 items and it equals 25 points or 25 hours of work. I then take those 12 to do's and then I reorder them in order of priority. Okay? This is so important, the most important, the highest urgency of priority, meaning that I need to do that as soon as possible because it's going to have the greatest impact on my business. Meaning there's a deadline attached to this, I need to get this done because there's a deadline or I need to get back to somebody or something like that. There's a sense of urgency, an urgent matter. I have to do it. Going to really move the needle, help my business in some way. That should be towards the top of the list. So I re rank my list so I know the order I do these tests. It's the same. I'm going to do all 12, but which one first, second, third matters because this actually lowers your anxiety because you know that the most important things get done first. And by the, you know, the first day or two of the week, you can kind of breathe a sigh of relief like you got it done and if this week just ended now, you'd be okay. It also reminds you that not all tasks are created equal. Not everything's gonna be urgent, not everything is gonna make or break your business. And it also solves the problem of which thing on my to do list do I do first? Well, you're telling yourself which one to do first. This One is the most urgent, most important. Gotta do it first. Then this one, this one, then this one, then this one, then this one. So you just rank it up. So now I know the order of the to do's I have to do next week. So when I start my day on Monday, I look at my to dos, I know the order I have to do them in, I know approximately how long it's gonna take for me to finish each task. So I know how to time box my time. And I can actually time box it on my calendar around my other actual tasks or meetings or, you know, email checking, all that kind of stuff. Now what this does is that it organizes your to do list. Not in terms of organizing it on paper, but it organizes it in your head. Before I used to do this, all the tasks seemed just as important as each other. I was having incredible feeling of like, I got to get this done and this done. Worry and can't sleep and having a hard time falling asleep because I'm thinking about constantly I might forget to do this or I haven't done this yet. Well, now with this system, I go to bed knowing I have a system. I know that I am getting the most important things done first. I know how long it's going to take me. I know that it's indefinite. You know, sometimes you feel a sense of anxiety because it's like, I got to get this PowerPoint presentation completed. I don't know how long it's going to take me. Am I going to get it done in time? Well, you'll know because you've already allotted how much time it's going to take with your point system in the beginning. So it all comes together and makes you feel a whole lot better about what's ahead and what you got to do and what's on your plate. Now, word of caution, the first time you do this, the first week you do this, you're not going to get it perfect. I didn't get it perfect. It actually took me about three or four weeks to hone it into perfection. And the reason why is because you might get your estimations a little bit off in terms of how much time you need to complete a task. You might put 25 tasks, but then you pile on another 40 throughout the week and you realize, oh man, I need to have less tasks at the beginning of the week because a lot of things come out of nowhere. So you're going to need to adjust it for your work schedule, for your workload, for the nature of your job and your team. But you will get it right after a few weeks. Another great tip that I actually think is worth you listening to this whole episode is that once you look at your to do list and you say, okay, I gotta get all these things done by the end of the week. One of the things I do is I look at them and I say, is there anything on this list somebody else can do for me or at least partially do for me, or, you know, prepare for me or help me in some way? A lot of times I can just outsource some of these tasks. Sometimes I can just ask somebody on my team already, hey, can you take care of this, this, and this for me? Whether it's an ea, whether it's somebody on one of your teams, one of your departments, for example, I need to put together some slides together for a webinar. Half of that task is just designing the slides and make them look good. I can come up with a word doc with the content of what I want to put on those slides and I can hand it over to a designer or our marketing administrator, Cindy, and say, hey, can you put these slides together using this content? I. I need it by this day. Done. Task over. Right? And that task went from a five to a one hour task in no time.

Okay.

So try to delegate as much as possible. Once you look at your list, this is going to lighten things up and make things feel a lot less stressful. It empowers you. It reminds you that, hey, you have options. You can hire somebody, you can get a freelancer, you can work with somebody, you can make it happen without you doing it. And this is a good muscle to flex. And if you don't use this muscle of delegation, it gets weak. You don't do it. You just forget about delegating.

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To wrap up today's lesson. Stress, anxiety. You got to have it under control as an entrepreneur. It's going to affect your decision making. It's going to affect your mental health, your physical health, your ability to perform at a high level. So the first step is just being aware that this is happening to you. You are experiencing this stress. Second is do something about it. Take action and take on some of the tips I shared with you today. Give it a try. You know, the other alternative is not trying something and continuing to experience the stress. So trying something, you're not going to lose anything, right? You're not going to get more stress. This is actually going to help you a lot and alleviate a lot of the stress. So it's worth a try. And it's actually quite easy to do. And I recommend just use the tool or the medium that you feel most comfortable with. I like pen and paper. You might like a checklist or Google Sheets or something else. But the point is that the practice is the same. Just use what you feel is easiest for you to just get going and to implement. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, you thought this was useful? Leave us an Apple Podcast rating or review subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you get our next episode automatically. Before I go, I want to leave you with this at the start of every day, especially the days that follow Monday, like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I look at the to do list for the week and I kind of try to pull out a chunk of what I'm going to do today. I kind of look at what I got done yesterday. I might carry over some stuff I didn't finish and I create kind of a mini to do list for today. Micro goals are a great, great thing. There's nothing like feeling that sense of accomplishment of crossing everything you're supposed to do today. So feel free to break up your weekly to do list into a daily to do list so you can feel like, yes, I gotta win. And momentum is powerful. As you get more and more comfortable with this and you complete every to do list for every day, you start to feel more and more empowered and less anxiety. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Free Art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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