How To Get Your To-Do List Done

It's no secret that I'm a fan of to-do lists.

I just find that I'm more productive and focused when I've got a to-do list to keep me on track. Looking back over the last couple of years, when I've neglected my to-do list, I seem to start drifting aimlessly and tend to waste a lot of precious time.

I've worked out a little system that ensures my to-do list is helping me work towards my goals, and doesn't become yet another bit of paper lying around.

Here's what works for me:

1. Set regular time aside to create your list. I usually work off a weekly to-do list. I tried daily to-do lists but usually over-estimated what I could achieve in a day, and ended up losing motivation. Any longer than a week and motivation also flags, since long deadlines seem to encourage procrastination and lack of focus.

Sunday evenings are my time to reflect on my life, my goals and what I hope to get done in the next week. I really look forward to this time, when I can focus on where my life is heading, what I want to achieve and be in this life, and most importantly, how I can get there.

I start out by jotting down all the things I already have planned or organized for the week, such as "Judah's birthday on Wednesday" or "School interview 9am Tues etc, then I figure out what I can reasonably expect to get done during that week.

2. Write it down properly. I keep a big A4 notebook. In the front, it has inspiring quotes and thoughts to uplift me. Each week, I write a to-do list on one page (it doesn't usually take up a whole page), and the opposite page I gradually fill in with ideas or bits of information that I want to remember, such as phone numbers or products and prices. 

I've never been able to get excited about computerized or internet to-do lists. Call me old-fashioned, but I just like the immediacy and accessibility of pen on paper.

3. Check it often. I check my to-to list daily, to make sure I'm on track and remind myself to keep aiming for my goals.

4. Break big tasks down into smaller steps. I love the feeling of accomplishment when I tick another item off my to-do list. It motivates me to stay on track and keep working towards what I want. Bearing this in mine, I give myself plenty chances to experience that feeling!

For example, rather than putting "Finish writing e-book" on my to-do list, I write "Finish Chapter 3 of e-book". Yes, I learned that one from experience! "Finish writing e-book" got rolled over onto next week's list about 3 times before I realized it might never happen if I didn't change something.

5 Remember what's important and what is the most effective use of your time. A to-do list should reflect our values and our goals. Keeping a to-do list for the sake of being busy is really a form of procrastination. Do what matters and choose effective over efficient.

6. Mix it up. This one may not work for everyone, but it works for me. I tend to mix it up a bit when I'm making a to-do list. Some items on there are quick and easy and may only take 15 minutes to complete (like checking ticket prices or paying a bill) while others are more time-consuming and have to be broken down into steps.

On any given day, I might aim to tick off 1-3 items from my list, depending on what they are. The trick is not to choose all the quick easy ones first and put off the more tiring or annoying ones until the last day of the week, because they'll probably just turn up again on next week's list!

I also add items from different areas of my life, it's not all business! My to-do list might range from "Follow up kit-home leads" to "Wax legs". I can glance at my to-do list and choose what's going to work in with other things that are happening on that day. I realize this may not work for everyone, but it's how I like to do it.

7. Know when "good" is good enough. Okay, I admit it. I've now edited this article three times since I hit "Publish". I'm not a perfectionist, really I'm not! Anybody who has watched me cook with joyful abandon and a distinct lack of measuring devices already knows this. I just seem to have this inbuilt tendency to accept nothing but my very best at all times.

Which is all wonderful, but we must remember not to make perfect the enemy of the good. In the words of Neale Donald Walsh (Or was it God's words? I can't remember): Perfection is the obstacle of creation and enemy of achievement. At some point you've got to say "This is good. And this is enough". If you cannot do this, you will never get anything done - and that is the opposite of what you want, is it not?

PS. In other exciting news, my e-book "The 7 Habits of Someone Who Never Gets Sick" will be available by the end of the week. I'm super excited to share some of my most cherished health secrets with you and hear how it transforms your life!

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The Blessing Line

One night, I sat up late talking with a friend. He was telling me about the "Blessing Line" and drawing it with his finger on the kitchen table. 

"Here" he pointed "is the blessing line, where abundance flows and blessings rain down on you. When you start the see the reward for all your efforts...

But here, before you cross over the blessing line, are challenges and disappointments and obstacles. This is where you feel most tired and discouraged. 

This", he said "is where most people give up. Right before they reach their blessing line."

Hmmmmm.

Come to think of it, I too have been guilty of doing just that!

One example springs to mind clearly. 

When I was 25, I started my own cleaning business. I planned and researched it for months. While I was still working at my day job, I began cleaning for a lady once a week, so that I would have a reference when I started looking for clients.

I planned that I would charge premium rates, give superb service and use only environmentally-friendly cleaning products.

When I felt I was ready, I accepted a voluntary redundancy from my job in accounts, and used the money to live on while I got my business off the ground.

I placed one ad on a free local classifieds site, and soon I had my first customers. I quoted what I thought was "good money" to me at the time. As promised, I gave excellent service. I did not leave the house until I knew for sure the skirting boards had been dusted and behind the toilet was spotless. The client may never have checked such things, but that was the standard I had set for myself.

After a short while, my customers began referring their friends and soon I was booked up. I was cleaning 3 houses per day, 5 days a week. It was tiring work, but I was earning a good income and I got into a really good routine where I could easily clean a 4bedroom, 2 bathroom house from top to bottom, in just over 2 hours. 

Soon it was time to think about employing someone. The first lady did a trial run, and spent the entire 2 hours cleaning the kitchen counter, and then rang to tell me she had found another job. (Phew!)

The second was a family friend, who did quite a good job, although not quite the attention to detail I would have liked. Sometimes, when he wasn't looking, I went back and did something he missed. Alone, I cleaned 3 houses per day, but together we could only manage 5.

By the time I paid him at the end of the week, I was left with just a couple of hundred dollars. Even though I had all the extra responsibility and did all the after-hours work of cleaning the equipment, washing the microfiber cloths, meeting potential clients to give quotes, and doing the book-work. 

Somehow I was working longer hours than ever and getting paid a pittance. I became so tired and run-down, I seemed to constantly have a cold. My son was only 2 yrs old at the time, and I barely saw him. My dream of running my own business had become a nightmare.

When I fell pregnant with my second son, it was such a relief to close the business and go back to my old job of getting paid by the hour and no after-hours stress.

I quit before I reached the blessing line.

What happened?

It was obviously a winning business idea. I hadn't spent a cent on advertising, the customers were happy (several years later, I still had customers email me to ask if I was cleaning again), but somehow it all went wrong.

The truth is that I used the obstacles and challenges as an excuse to quit, rather than using them as a reason to go beyond my comfort zone. I was afraid to hire more staff or a manager, because I didn't know how to be a leader or bring up uncomfortable issues if they weren't performing properly (I could have learnt!). I didn't want to raise my prices to cover the cost of hiring others because I didn't know how to tell the customers (I could have found a way!).

I wanted to stay where I was comfortable, not realizing that my business could only grow and expand to the extent that I was willing to grow and expand, myself. 

So, I quit when things got tough and I never saw the blessing line.

The cynic in us might wonder why, if God is so loving, does He make life so hard for us? Is he trying to find out if we are "deserving" enough?

I don't think that's the case at all.

Problems are not meant to discourage us, they're not meant to annoy or destroy us. 

They are sent to grow us. 

Problems are our teachers!

Let's face it, when life is comfortable, we have little desire or inclination to change. But when faced with a problem, we're forced to do something. We can turn and run, or we can use it as an opportunity to improve ourselves and our skills. 

The choice is ours.

What about you? Have you ever quit before you reached your blessing line?

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How To Turn Your Big, Crazy Idea Into Reality (Part 4)

So, in Part 3 we took the first action step towards turning our idea into reality. When you took that first step - whether it was sending an email, making an appointment, booking a ticket - you then gained insight into what further steps might be.

Part 4 is where consistency and commitment become vitally important because, somewhere between taking that first step and actually reaching your goal, there will be (not may be) obstacles, challenges, stumbling blocks and moments where you’ll question your sanity for ever dreaming up such a ridiculous idea!

But there will also be moments of incredible triumph and satisfaction as you tackle each obstacle and find a way to overcome it, and these moments will fuel your commitment. 

When we set a goal, we make a choice to direct our energies towards that goal. But that same decision must be made hundreds, maybe thousands of times over. We make that same choice every day. We make that same choice every time we are faced with a decision that impacts our goal. That is commitment. Making a decision, then making it again, and again, and again...until your decision manifests into reality.

In Part 3, I spoke about not seeing the whole staircase, but taking the first step anyway. I often think it’s a blessing that we can’t see the whole staircase in the beginning (and all the obstacles and challenges along the way), or we may well become discouraged and give up before we’ve even begun.

It’s been almost 2 years since I dreamed up this crazy plan to build a house on a tropical island, and despite so many long months of blood, sweat and tears, we still haven’t laid the first brick yet (although it's getting mercifully close)! If I knew then what I know now, I might have had second thoughts, but that’s the point! I didn’t know then, what I know now, but I’ve come this far and I’m certainly not going to quit now. I’ll see this through until I’m firmly ensconced in my own home amongst the coconut palms and banana trees. 

In fact, virtually nothing has gone to plan, and that is the very reason I’ve grown so much from this experience. If everything went perfectly to plan, I may well be enjoying the comforts of my own home by now, instead of being crammed into a large group house with my in-laws and extended family. But then again, I wouldn’t be the person I am now. I wouldn’t have been pushed to my limits and discovered that I didn’t break – instead, I grew…and my limits expanded. 

Here’s just a sample of the benefits gained from my experience:

It pushed me out of my comfort zone: My husband decided to go overseas and work, so I was left in charge of clearing the land and building a house (both of which I'd never done before). I was forced to go way beyond my comfort zone, and also forced to start speaking the language a lot more, rather than my previous dabbling attempts.

Gratitude: I realized what a blessing it is to have a place to call “home”. Two years with a family of 5 crammed into one bedroom has a way of doing that to a person! When I finally have my own space again, I will cherish it like never before, simply because I have experienced it's opposite.

Anger can be used to our advantage: I realized that anger is a powerful force and it is only “positive” or “negative” depending on how I direct it. Living in an overcrowded house with extended family from a different culture has brought it’s fair share of frustrations. Once upon a time, I would sit in my room and simmer, but I then I began to realize that this really didn't serve me at all. 

I decided to channel my anger into ways that served me better. So, each time I felt frustrated by the lack of privacy or personal space, or different ways of doing things, I simply used it as fuel to stay motivated and keep working towards my own home.

Learned to let go: I learnt to not be so attached to possessions. Living in one bedroom means we can only keep what we really need. Not only that, but being in one room with three young children, things are constantly getting lost or broken. You can either let it drive you slowly insane, or you can let it go…

Discovered my own strength: I realized that I am stronger than I ever thought possible. Somewhere between the cockroaches, ants, mosquitoes, rats running over me in the night, fleas, centipede bites, a couple of cyclones, several earthquakes, tropical heat that is so stifling you feel like you might actually pass out, bacterial skin infections, cold showers, washing all our clothes by hand, collecting drinking water by hand, constant requests for help, invasion of personal space, cultural misunderstandings…somewhere amongst all of that, I realized I can handle anything, if I choose to. I can let it defeat me, or I can let it grow me. The choice is always mine. This one lesson alone makes it all worthwhile, and I’m grateful for everything that made such an epiphany possible.

But here's the flip side. The very process of trying to achieve big, crazy goals is that they reveal us to ourselves. They take us way beyond our comfort zone, strip us of illusions, humble us and empower us all at once. And this is why we may come to realize that we don't actually want what we thought we wanted!

One of my friends, when she was in her early 20's and a mother of 2 little girls, set a goal to be a millionaire by the time she turned 30. She worked towards her goal with great dedication. She wrote books, built up a profitable blog, became a mentor and public speaker, and experienced a personal transformation and spiritual awakening. 

But somewhere along the way she came to realize that she really didn't care about being a millionaire at all, and eventually moved her goals to suit her new life perspective. Does this mean the experience was a failure? Of course not. If not for her goal, she might never have published 2 books (with another in the pipeline), she might never have built up a blog that motivates so many people to take control of their finances, might never have had the opportunity to help the homeless. Or might never have discovered her true life purpose or "awakened" spiritually.

There is no shame in re-assessing a goal and adjusting or even abandoning it altogether. This is not failure, and not a waste of time, because the journey has revealed things that you can now use to live a more authentic life. How can anyone possibly regard that as failure? 

Just be sure that the motive for changing or abandoning your goal really is new awareness of what you want in life, and NOT an attempt to back out of something that scares you or tests your patience beyond your comfortable limits.

But if you look back at the three criteria in Part 1 (do-able, desirable, and in alignment with life purpose) and the answer is still yes to all three, then keep going. Take the first step. Then take another one. And another one. Keep repeating, until you arrive at your destination...

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How To Turn Your Big, Crazy Idea Into Reality (Part 3)

Part 3 of turning your big, crazy idea into reality involves taking action. Part 1 involved thinking and deciding, then Part 2 ventured into talking…but thinking and talking alone won’t make your idea come alive. You need to actually do something. You need to make that phone-call, send that email, go to that meeting, or book that ticket..!

It really doesn’t matter if you haven’t carefully plotted and planned every step of the way. It really doesn’t matter if you can’t even see beyond the first step! 

Big ideas are not meant to be nice predictable plans that simply allow you to repeat what you already know! They’re meant to confound and baffle you. They’re meant to test you. They’re meant to grow you. That is their beauty. When you finally reach your goal, you will be a wiser, stronger, better version of the person you were to begin with...

When we decided to build a house overseas, we had no idea how to go about doing it, but after talking to people, we decided the best way to go about it would be to source most of our supplies in Australia and ship them over, and just buy bricks and cement locally since they were reasonably priced (while everything else was hideously expensive).

We had zero experience with importing/exporting, so the logical first step was to go online and start contacting shipping agencies for a quote, and find out what we had to do. They gave us the information we needed, and that information was enough for us to realize that we needed to hire storage space while we gathered our supplies together.

Finding storage space then became the logical next step, but only as a consequence of taking the first step.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said: “You don’t need to see the whole staircase. You just need to take the first step.” 

How many times do we procrastinate and do nothing, because we can’t fully envision the end result, or can’t figure out how to get there?

For four years – four years! – I talked about how I wanted to build a “Steve Pavlina” kind of site, with my own unique look and feel. But I kept putting it off, because I couldn’t figure out a name, and I couldn’t picture the layout or how it would look.

 I told myself, if I could just figure out what to call it – something that encompassed all that I stood for – then I could just get started. 

Last year, I had a blog designer redesign my header section. But it just wasn’t “me”, and to make matters worse, I couldn’t describe what “me” was all about, even to myself!! So, I began to design my own header. I simply began playing around with pictures that I liked, before I finally said “Yes! That’s the one!”, then I updated the fonts and headings, then moved onto re-labeling all my posts and fixing up my social icons.

At this point, I suddenly had a moment of absolute clarity where I knew what to name my site. Really! It was so simple, I was astonished that I hadn't seen it earlier…

Then, everything began to fall into place. I began to see with great certainty exactly what my site would look like, what it would offer, what my articles would be about. Actually, I began having dreams about blog post ideas, and waking up in the middle of the night with brilliant ideas for subjects I just had to write about. 

Only now could I formulate specific goals for my site, rather than some vague notion, like “Steve Pavlina-type site, but without the polyamory…”

Have you ever noticed the longer you procrastinate on making a decision, the more indecisive you become? When you finally commit to a certain course of action, and begin moving in that direction, things just seem to start falling into place?

Goals and vision-boards are great, but action really proves our commitment. 

There would be NO businesses in this world, if every new entrepreneur waited to know everything before she began. Rather, she begins and she makes mistakes, she learns from those mistakes, and she corrects course…and that is how successful businesses grow from fumbling first steps. 

Sometimes the dream takes hold within us, and it’s fuzzy around the edges, it’s vague…but it’s no less real. We wait and wait for further clarity, but it doesn’t come, and the dream remains just that - a dream. 

We don’t need to see the whole staircase we just need to take the first step. And with each step, the entire stair-case begins to take form. It’s no longer a blurry dream or a vague concept, but a very real, achievable prospect. 

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