How many times have you felt uninspired looking at the ever-increasing Mount Everest of task lists that, without care for, your mental health is ever increasing? I know the feeling. I tried many solutions over the years, and many have worked well. Some not so well, but recently the consolidation of many of my tasks and the prioritization of what is important has brought me to a whole new level of insight into my workload.
Starting from failure
You probably feel overwhelmed, and if you do, then your current system is failing. You should be able to manage your workload effortlessly and, with minimal effort, go from task completion to the next one after the other with minimum fuss. You may wonder if that’s even possible. But once you have mastered this straightforward concept, you will be infinitely more motivated to complete the tasks.
You have to be precise about the current system you are using. Are you even using a system? Or are you just working from your mind? I have a tip for you. Don’t keep anything in your mind except for creative ideas. This means you take your responsibilities and you write them down. If you haven’t done this, your current system is failing, and it will only be a matter of time before your failure stops inspiring you and opens the gates of hell for you instead.
Single handling
With every task in your mind, once you have written it down, you should take the GTD-inspired approach and stick to single handling. That means when you make some measurable step forward regarding completion or what is planned next, the task is updated with the latest notes and then put away until thoughts about it reoccur.
Building your lists
You must get every loose-end revenue channel, social media profile, or website login details written down in an easy-to-access place central to your work. Only then can you have data and mental integrity, meaning everything is in place. Didn’t your Granny teach you that already? You have just never been actively using it. That’s the problem with many systems; they tell you to write down your tasks. They don’t tell you why, and to write down everything to free up your mind for thinking, not storing.
Master priority focus list
This is where you take the very best of what you need to focus on each day and, through some achievement, make progress. For your web publishing or influencer business, I broke this down into three ideas:
- Publish to assets
- Build assets
- Study assets
These are the three ideals that you should focus on, and with the master priority list, you look for the tasks that you can publish to your assets daily. For example, the ones that will make the most impact are e-commerce products, blog posts, or social media posts. The things that are your bread and butter money-making tasks. It doesn’t belong here if you can’t finish it within a couple of hours. That should be classed as an asset that is being built. As in the publish to asset priority identification, you look for what’s most accessible and makes the most money.
Procrastinate on everything else
If you have this priority list to work from, you’ll probably find that through the working day, while you tick things off, you remember other unrelated things that you should work on or catch up with. It’s easy. Just procrastinate on these things while at the same time jotting down the ideas in an easy-to-access temporary storage document that you can regularly look at and build whatever is on it into your task lists at a later date.
You’ll find time for these things eventually. The key to avoiding worrying about them is having them written down in your master lists somewhere apparent that you know how to get back to. Then you can get back to your high-priority publish to the asset list. Currently, I have 22 things on my list, ranging from daily blog posting to youtube videos and forum management.
Reflection time
As with anything, if you get too deep, you can’t see the forest for the trees. So take some time to study the performance and effects your daily publishing has on those assets. If you’re working on websites, it might be your traffic to the content or the number of shares it gets. It might be the number of views or money earned from Youtube videos.
For almost every platform you could hope to make money and promote yourself on, there is an analytical tool solution to monitor and track the performance of the asset over time. Sometimes these can cost a few dollars per month. Most times, there are alternative limited free solutions.
Practicing everyday
Nothing is perfect, and nothing is easy. That’s something you might have already faced in life. Thats why this particular level of focus on your high-priority publishing agenda should be strived towards and not beaten up about if you don’t exceed your expectations. Stick at it, and you’ll spend more time making the kind of content you want without the excess baggage.
