We tend to focus on our to-do list and the things that we haven’t done yet. But what can you stop doing? For most of us, the to-do list stays the same or gets longer and doesn’t make a dent over time.
What if we took a different approach and looked at what we’re going to stop doing rather than what we need to do? The
reason that you can’t get to the things on your to-do list is that you’ve got too many things on your doing list. Seems pretty simple but we don’t always see it.
For most of us, tasks become so automatic that we don’t even question the fact that we’re doing them or why we’re doing them. Taking things off your to-do list can almost be as hard, if not harder, than doing the things that are on your to-do list.
Recently I canceled three services that I like because I didn’t have time to use them. They were hard to let go of because I did like them, and I was paying for them. I was forcing myself to use them so I wouldn’t lose the value of the subscription. But at the end of the day, this was just taking time away from something else.
Take some time to take inventory
What are the things that you’re doing that don’t need to be done anymore? It’s really easy to get into an automated routine of doing things. When I was in the military, we did an audit of sorts on information production. We had regular products that were produced by different organizations on different frequencies. I distinctly remember two huge products that were produced twice a year. We eventually found out that the organization that they were being produced for had stopped doing what they were doing. So they would get these reports twice a year and put them on a shelf. You may be doing something similar. You’ve been doing it the way that you’re doing it for so long that it’s automatic.
For hard products, most of us would have figured it out by now. That isn’t the case with less tangible things.
Social media can be a rabbit hole. I constantly get pitches from marketers wanting them to help me with my Instagram feed. It’s not very effective. But I’m quick to point out that I get 43,000 views a month on Pinterest. Because for the type of stuff that I’m producing, that is the better platform. Same with LinkedIn. I found that that is probably the fastest-growing platform for me right now. I don’t plan on doing Tik Tok videos. And Twitter is a lot of noise. But it’s easy to automate. And I do see some value in it. Look at what you are doing and try to only focus on what’s working, and forget the rest.
Take a look at the services that you use
Another rabbit hole is artificial intelligence. There are some cool tools out there. I had been using an AI content creation tool that I liked and was part of the original development but I had to make the hard decision to get rid of it. I saw the direction that technology was going in related to chat GPT. A lot of the content creation I was doing was no longer going to have as much value as it did before. So I canceled the service. These are just a few examples of the types of things that you might be able to take off of your list. What this does, is it makes room for other things. It may be things that you’ve been wanting to do like exercise, travel, or writing a book. Or it may mean suddenly having time in your life to take care of a family member who is in hospice or a car accident or both. You never know.
