Episode #24 Image: How to Overcome To-Do List Overwhelm

Today we’re talking about how to manage your to do list, especially if you are feeling burnt out and overwhelmed.

If you’re one of those people whose to do list always seems to get longer by the end of day instead of shorter, this episode is for you. I feel you because I’m typically this kind of person as well!

I’ll be sharing some practical tips for making your to do list feel manageable and not like a stressful burden. This topic has been coming up a lot lately in my conversations with my students who are enrolled in Acupuncture Marketing School and in the Q&A portion of guest lectures.

And as we head into the holiday season, everyone’s schedules go a little crazy and this conversation feels even more necessary. 

I don’t know about you but all of a sudden there are more things to do on my to do list, and way less time to do everything because of the holidays, making time for family, prioritizing cookie baking, etc. 

Let’s dig into this topic and relieve some of that stress!

🎙️ Listen to Episode #24: How to Overcome To-Do List Overwhelm: Practical Tips

Show Notes:

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Transcript:

Hello there! Today we’re talking about how to manage your to do list, especially if you are feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. If you’re one of those people whose to do list always seems to get longer by the end of day instead of shorter, this episode is for you. I feel you because I’m typically this kind of person as well.

I want to share some practical tips for making your to do list feel manageable and not like a stressful burden. This topic has been coming up a lot lately in my conversations with my students who are enrolled in Acupuncture Marketing School and in the Q&A portion of guest lectures. How do I make my to-do list feel manageable?

And this time of year, as we head into the holiday season, everyone’s schedules go a little crazy and this conversation feels even more necessary. I don’t know about you but all of a sudden there’s way more things to do on my to do list and way less time to do everything because of the holidays, making time for family, etc.

Let’s dig into this topic and relieve some of that stress. Before we do that, I want to share a recent review that was left for the podcast. I’m so grateful for this review from KayKea of Canada. KayKea says, “It’s wild that this podcast is free. There is so much good information on here. One of my fave podcasts.”

Thank you. It totally makes my day to read your reviews and your feedback about anything that I create or produce for you. It means a ton and the reviews also help other acupuncturists find the podcast and decide if it is going to be a good fit for them.

If you love the podcast, I’d appreciate it so much if you left a review. I’ll drop the link in the show notes if you’d like to do that, and know that I’m grateful in advance.

I have one other thing that I cannot wait to share with you – On Sunday, Dec. 5th, I’ll be hosting the Acu Biz Planathon. I’m so excited to invite you to join me for this annual event. It’s here, it’s finally here!

Last year around this time I hosted the Acu Biz Planathon with Robin Ray Green and it was an absolute blast. Unfortunately she won’t be hosting with me this year because she’s super busy teaching pediatric acupuncture online. Very cool stuff. But that’s okay. I’ll be hosting the workshop and I’m so excited.

It’s a really fun, live workshop. The purpose is to help you define your big goal for 2022 and outline a 90 day plan to get you moving towards that goal immediately. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for any amount of time, you probably know that I really love strategic planning and so I am thrilled to be teaching this online workshop.

We’re going to review 2021, release any energy from this year that you need to let go of, anything that didn’t happen the way that you wanted to. It’s okay, we have fresh energy coming. And of course we’ll celebrate all the good things that did happen for you and your business – the personal and professional goals that you met in 2021. We’re gonna have a little happy dance moment for all the things you did accomplish.

And then we’re going to identify your goals for 2022 and as I said, outline your 90 day plan, step by step so you can begin moving towards that goal.

I’ll be guiding you through the 90-day planning workbook and by the end of the workshop, you’ll have an actionable plan that you’ve created surrounding your goals. We’re really going to dig in, it’s going to be a lot of fun, I have some fun surprises planned. I’ll put the link in the show notes so you can register if you’d like to join me.  The cost is $47 and seats are limited.

I hope you can join me for this, it’s one of my favorite workshops that I teach all year. I love planning, reflecting on the prior year, and organizing my thoughts and my goals so – I cannot wait to do this with you. If you have questions about the workshop, please feel free to send me an email at michelle@michellegrasek.com, and of course if you can’t attend live a replay will be available.

All right, let’s talk about these practical tips for making your to do list feel manageable and not overwhelming.

The first step is to pare down your to do list. Prioritize the things that really move the needle towards whatever your goals are. If your to do list is all about marketing and getting more patients, then really narrow down your list to only those things that actually bring in new patients the fastest and generate revenue.

Another way to look at this is to say, remove the things that don’t move the needle. And be honest with yourself about how much you can accomplish in a day.

Now, I know this was probably not what you were expecting me to say – to simply start taking things off your list. But in my conversations with my marketing students and my one on one coaching clients, I’m finding that most of us are adding an unreasonable amount of items to our to do list every day. And even if we feel super energized about our list to begin with, we’re adding so many things that no single human could accomplish them all in a day.

So at the end of the day, we have an unfinished list and we feel really bad about it. I also find that, as entrepreneurs, we’re very creative thinkers, we have a lot of great ideas. And so as we go through our day, we keep adding things to the to do list. And this might be a daily to do list or it might be a list for this month or this quarter.

But even though we’re accomplishing things, we just keep adding and adding and adding an unreasonable amount of things so that our list gets longer and is never quote, “complete.” And then that makes us feel pretty bad at the end of the day of the quarter.

My business coach Sarah Morgan, creator of the Dare to Grow podcast, advised me a long time ago to only have three things on my to do list each day. So that’s only three “must do” items. No more than that because you’ve got to be reasonable about what you can actually get done in a day.

You might be thinking, what if each item is really brief? That’s different. I’m talking about no more than three projects. Because most projects actually have a lot of steps. It’s easy to just write a task on your list that sound simple, like do Instagram marketing for this week. And then add 6 other things you need to do today as well. But then you realize that “do Instagram marketing for the week” is actually like 10 or 12 steps on it’s own. So this is about paring down your list to the biggest three priorities each day that will move the needle in your business. Only including things that can reasonably be accomplished in a day, or a week, whatever your timeframe is for this list.

And then your second step is to spend some time determining how long each activity on your to do list actually takes. This is for the repeatable items on your to do list. Using the Instagram example I just mentioned: if one of your items on a Monday is to do your Instagram marketing for the week, maybe that’s actually too much for you to accomplish in a single day, in combination with the other things you need to do on a Monday.  SO you have to figure out, how long does it take, so you can appropriately add it to a day where you have time for it. Sit down and set a timer the next time you do the task. Then you can say, okay, it takes me an hour and 15 minutes to complete three Instagram posts from start to finish, including writing captions, finding images and setting them up to autopublish.

This helps prevent that trap of adding an unreasonable amount of stuff on our list each day because we are not calculating or understanding how long each item will take us to complete.

I have to admit that I’m guilty of this. I always think that things are going to take less time than they do, because I’m not accounting for the mental planning. I assume I’m just going to dive in and write or record whatever it is with no errors, without having to redo any part of it. I think I’m just going to spit it out perfectly the first time, which honestly never, ever happens. So I now I know I have to build in time for organizing my thoughts, creating a first draft of whatever I’m working on, whether it’s IG posts or a podcast episode, and polishing it before it’s really done.

That’s a lot of extra time I hadn’t accounted for until I started actually timing myself. I really recommend this. The next time you’re doing an item from your to do list that you repeat often, set a timer so that you can say okay, it takes this long for me to write and schedule my Instagram posts for the week. So that when you are creating your to do list for next week, you can make it more reasonable.

The third step is to ask yourself if the things on your to do list are actually aligned with your values and your priorities. I think this is really essential if you want to shed the overwhelm and feeling of burnout that happens from looking at your to do list and feeling like you’re never making any progress.

I learned this tip from Tiwa Ogunlesi, creator of the Confident and Killing It podcast. She had an amazing episode where she talked about to do list burnout, this specific topic, and why aligning your personal values with your to-do list will help relieve the burnout you feel.

This boils down to essentially putting personal things on your to do list. Making your to do list about your life. Because you’re an entrepreneur, your work is your life, right? So make your to do list about your whole life and not just your business. And that will help you restore balance.

I will definitely link Tiwa’s podcast in the show notes for you to listen to in full, it’s a really great episode.

This practice has made such a big difference in my life and in my business. For many entrepreneurs, especially solopreneurs, we make a to do list that is meant to be for our nine to five “work day.”

But we often feel a lot of pressure, because whether or not we make money is all on us. And if we don’t finish our unreasonable to do list between nine and five, we just keep working on it until we go to bed. And obviously you can’t do that long term because you can’t pour from an empty cup.

We know that but what can we do from a practical perspective to help our to do list feel balanced with our actual life? How can we make sure that as we’re building businesses, those businesses are aligned with how we want to live?

Tiwa’s remedy for this is to define your top five values or priorities in your life. And then every day make sure at least one of the to do list items on your list reflect those priorities and values.

Whether this is spending time with your family, or having alone time to meditate or journal, or exercising or meal prep, or all of the above – those things go on your list. As as I said, as entrepreneurs, a lot of us live and die by our lists from sun up to sundown. And if it’s the case that you only have work on that list, and nothing that nourishes and supports you, then that’s a recipe for burnout.

We also know as acupuncturists that in order for us to show up at our best for our patients is to take care of ourselves behind the scenes. So consider if that needs to be added to your to do list to help you achieve some balance – adding your values and priorities as items on your to do list.

One other way to think about this is to do an objective self assessment, AKA, take a really hard look at how you are actually spending your time, your money, your resources – like your emotional energy, your physical energy and your financial resources – and ask yourself, “Am I doing the things that reflect my priorities?”

This specific tip comes from Stacy Tuschl, creator of the Foot Traffic podcast. She recently had an episode all about your priorities. I will link her podcast in the show notes of course. She talks about avoiding overwhelm and burnout as entrepreneurs. Her recommendation is to do an objective self assessment to see whether your energy is actually spent on your priorities or not, by opening up your calendar for the past three months, and opening up your credit card statements or your bank statements for the past three months. And taking a look through both while asking yourself, are the things that you say are your priorities actually on your calendar? And are the things that you proclaim as your priorities actually where you are putting in your finances? And I’ve never thought to do this before. But your calendar and your credit card statement don’t lie, right

In some cases, you might discover that you are actually prioritizing your values and the things that are important to you. And in other cases it can be eye opening to realize that you think you are, or you want to, but aren’t. For example, if you said that one of your values is making more time for your closest friends and you can see on you calendar that you spent time with my friends three times in the past month, then you can decide if that satisfies your value. To me, three times in a month with friends sounds great. For other people, it might not be enough. Or maybe you know that your values are spending time with your friends, but making time for them is nowhere on your calendar. Then you know what values and the priorities you need to add to your to do list.

The next step might actually be the hardest. If you do these things, if you prioritize and pare down your list, if you determine how much time it takes to actually accomplish the things on your list and you create to do lists that are reasonable within your eight hour work day. And you really do that objective self assessment and determine if your to do list and your resources are aligned with your values –

If you do all of that and you’re still feeling overwhelmed and burnt out by your list, then it’s time to start asking for help from other people. This could be in your personal life or this could be in your business, or both.

It could mean asking your family for help with things at home. Or this could mean hiring a virtual assistant or an in-person office assistant. The thing here is that if you’ve genuinely done your absolute best to manage your to do list and you are still feeling crushed by it, it really is time to consider hiring someone to take things off your plate.

I have an entire episode about hiring a virtual assistant, a VA. We cover how to know if you need one, what kind of things can you ask them to do, even how much I pay my VA. Listen to that episode if you’re on the fence about hiring a virtual assistant and whether that’s what you need and how that works. I think it’ll help a ton. I will include the link in the show notes.

But think about the items on your list that just feel like they’re crushing you. If you’re honest, you can probably assign those tasks to other people, right? A VA can probably help or maybe you need an actual person in your office, an office assistant, to do things like taking money. rescheduling patients, flipping treatment rooms between patients. Even sanitizing those darn cups so that you don’t have to do that at the end of the day. And so you can focus on what’s most important – your patients – and not feel weighed down by the laundry list of other things you feel like you should be doing at the same time.

Here’s a couple exercises for you to do to help you decide what, if anything, you’re ready to have taken off your plate. These are kind of fun. They were recommended to me during a mastermind group coaching call with my business coach Sarah Morgan.

It was a little while ago and I mentioned feeling crushed by my to do list, how it felt like I was drowning in it. You know that feeling? And one of the other members of this group coaching program, the amazing Joi from the website Joiknowshow.com, gave me this exercise. Definitely check her out, by the way, Joi is a coach for multi passionate creative entrepreneurs and she teaches a LOT about how to focus and show up as your best self.

She said, start a list and keep it on your your desk. And as you go through your day, start writing down every single thing that you wish you could transfer to someone else. Like what are all of the things that you don’t want to do anymore? What are the tasks that you’d just love to pass off to someone else?

And she said, to take the pressure off, let this be a fantasy list. So don’t let any thoughts get in the way, for example, “But I can’t really hand that off to someone else,” or, “It would take me too long to train someone to do this.” This is just you, creating a fantasy list of tasks for a fantasy virtual assistant or office assistant. You’re identifying the things on your list that you could potentially let someone else do, that are weighing you down, and keeping you from showing up at 110% for the things you DO want to do.

And, ultimately those are just those thoughts are not true. And they are holding you back. There are people out there who could work for you, even just 3-5 hours a week, who are smart, who do a great job, and who could take some of the things off your plate.

And, yes, you might have to take a little bit of time to train someone, but in the long run it would free up way more of your time. So start a list at your desk or on your phone – my fantasy list of things in my business or in my life that I don’t want to do anymore that I would love to pass off to someone else. And then if you see themes repeating, seriously consider actually hiring someone to pass it off to, so you can focus on your zone of genius and what really matters.

I hope these steps are really useful for you, especially as we enter into the holiday season when people tend to be busier than ever, balancing work, life, family, etc. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Don’t be afraid to pare down your list. Prioritize the things that are actually going to move your business towards making money. And add your values to your to do list so that you can actually feel nourished at the end of the day instead of worn down.

All right, don’t forget to register for the Acu Biz Planathon. We’ll be live on Sunday, December 5th at 11:00 am Eastern Time. If you want to join me, it’s $47 and the link is in the show notes.

I would love to see you there. I cannot wait to help you define your goals for 2022. I know you’re going to create some beautiful, amazing things in your business for your patients in 2022. So let’s do this together. The link is in the show notes to register.

And I have some really fun episodes coming up for you as we close out the year. Next episode I’ll be talking about all the mistakes I made with my marketing this year. The things that really just did not work, that were a flop. I can’t wait to share those with you.

And then the last episode of the year before I take some time off, we’ll be talking about what did work in marketing acupuncture practice in 2021. So I cannot wait to talk to you then. Have a great week. Thanks for being here, and I’ll talk to you next time.