How I overcame my overwhelming to-do list

⏳ tl;dr

We as humans become overwhelmed easily, the unknown is scary and the mind drifts into procrastination to avoid the burden of tasks we have put in front of ourselves. But we can achieve reaching our goals and success by breaking down the big overbearing rock into small, pocket-size chunks so we can carry a little bit at a time. I found that my productivity has really skyrocketed by looking at the things I am good at, and asking why and how I managed that, it’s easy to forget. By taking the biggest goals I have ever set for myself I am able to put 2 hours a day towards them and make continuous improvement by simply asking, how do I show up every day.

🤕 My Problem

This year I became self-employed, and what I quickly realised is that there is a lot to do, because I wanted to achieve a lot. Things like:

A YouTube Channel and blog that helps people get things done
Building an audience and a community around those ideas
Building a company so I keep the lights on, but also in the further future buy house and travel more further down the line

Therefore, when I was looking at my to-do list and goals, and what do I need to make this happen, it was huge. So much so it put me off and demotivated me. In fact, I am sure a lot of people experience this, wanting to reach a lofty goal to only be unenthused because of the huge work that is needed. Equally, I think it is tough on someone that consume a lot of media around hustle culture, that is to brute force it into existence. But it is absolutely fine to want something, but struggle to find the motivation to do it.

🤔 My Hypothesis

Right now, I want to get things under my belt to improve my business and my self-leadership. For example, I have met with several leads who want to get their ideas to prototype as quickly and cheaply as possible, but don’t have the skills in order to do it and therefore cannot capitalise on good opportunities. If I manage to create an offering that will provide that for a relatively small price, then I can build a revenue stream around it and that will aid my business to succeed.

In researching this I can take my skills in being able to code and learn REACT, a front end framework, then this will be a great tool to achieve just that. But as mentioned, having a goal of “be amazing at REACT so that I can build prototypes fast” is a huge undertaking. But, I have managed to be amazing at a lot of things, like playing the guitar, and the fact is that if you ask anyone who is a good musician how they managed it, they will all give you the same answer, practice every day.

I thought what if I applied the same logic to my mountainous goals. Do a little bit every day rather than trying to take on big tasks in one go. This is what I did, I wrote down a goal for the year, broke that down into 3 monthly increments, then for the closest goal I worked out how can I achieve this by spending a small amount of time each morning. Therefore, I learn to code REACT for one hour as I have my morning coffee. I then went through all of my yearly goals and did the same, which gave me a to-do list of daily mini-tasks, or how I SHOW UP EVERY DAY

Next was to hack my brain, with my list of daily chunks I had a routine, so I created a trigger-routine-reward loop i.e. setting a habit in place. I also created an association at the same time. I would listen to Chillstep only whilst “showing up every day”, basically getting my brain to get into the right space each time.

🤔 Did breaking down big tasks into daily chunks help me?

Absolutely, doing an hour of REACT a day for the last 4 weeks is easy and gives structure to what I am doing, like building sidebar navigation, rather than leaving until the weekend and then Sunday become an 8-hour coding session. And, overlapping tasks have started to happen, This blog page was the concept and scripting for the YouTube video I made on it, and I spent 20mins just making it more cohesive.

🎓 What I have learnt

Motivation is fleeting, it comes when an idea arises and disappears went the work has to be done. But, routine is powerful when I get it right. Being intentional and having self-leadership is key. Knowing to stay surface level, and getting into the weeds when motivation finally decides to show up, means I can get things done. Lastly, I am on my path to success, I have achieved some of my 3-month goals and things are falling into place.

I’ve created a template for you to work on your goals here!