A New Service Offering

Here’s the idea:

You’ll write your to-do list on a sheet of paper.

I’ll come to your office, rip the sheet in half, and leave.

All for the low price of $100. 

Once you’ve proven that you’ve gotten the first few items done, you can pay $100 to release the next three items. And so forth. (Every business is chasing recurring revenue streams, right?)

* * *

I came up with that idea a couple of weeks ago while joking around with a colleague about what’s valuable in our coaching engagements. I think I’m a decent coach, but if there were a way to force my clients just to slim down their to-do lists and approach their projects sequentially rather than simultaneously, it’d probably be as useful. 

I came back to the idea this past week after multiple instances of clients making statements like these:

• I’m too scattered, and because of that, I’m not getting things done.

• Our team is pulled in so many directions that we never make progress on what’s important.

• Because board members can’t see progress, they wonder what we’re doing between meetings.

Those statements represent a common dynamic in teams and organizations. 

When teams have too many projects going at once, the meetings multiply—every project has its own coordination meetings, and there are meetings to coordinate across projects. It’s like with traffic—once there are enough cars on the road, even if everyone is driving responsibly, there will be a traffic jam. 

Moreover, when people have too many projects going, they must constantly switch between contexts. It’s like tackling your weekend cleaning by washing one dish, then walking to the bedroom to fold one item of clothing, then walking to the backyard to rake one square foot of leaves. Walking between tasks creates its own fatigue, even before you get anything done. 

And when being spread across multiple projects means making only small amounts of progress on each, you don’t get the emotional satisfaction of completion—more like running on a treadmill than crossing the finish line. In the weekend cleaning example above, doing everything at once means that, even as steady work is being done, the house still feels messy all day.  

Whenever I see that pattern with clients, I usually nudge them to try radically rationalizing their to-do list and approaching their work sequentially. “What would it look like to just do one thing at a time?” 

However, while everyone gets the notion of prioritization and most buy the “traffic jam” argument for a different approach—i.e, you’ll actually get more done when you do fewer things at once—many get stuck in place. They are hung up on the sense that every project seems important, or at least it’s important enough to someone else that it would be difficult to eliminate or delay.  

Unfortunately, that uncertainty leads to inaction. The core idea behind the Rip Your To-do List in Half service offering is to generate experimental action that would enable someone to experience the emotional benefits of taking a new approach. 

Aside from actually offering that service, these questions are usually helpful in opening the door to action. 

1. Are there any projects on your plate that don’t need to be a “project?” 

For a leadership team I worked with recently, the executives realized that while they have standing meetings for check-ins and coordination, they don’t have standing working sessions. So, many of their team’s tasks became projects not because they took a lot of time, but because the time they required had to be spread over multiple weeks, since the working sessions only fit in the nooks and crannies of their busy calendars.

They didn’t need more time—they just needed to proactively rearrange their time to push initiatives to completion.  

2. What if you took a hybrid approach? 

When one team’s leaders told me that it would be hard to fully prioritize their effort, I mentioned Gary Keller’s suggestion in The ONE Thing that individuals should ask themselves continually, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?” However, his solution isn’t to be 100% focused on that “one thing,” but to devote just the first hours of each day to it. That approach recognizes that executives can’t ignore everything else on their to-do lists, but it provides a container for that work that prevents it from dominating. 

Others find it helpful to create containers for their non-priority work, like “Revisit Later.” If eliminating a project seems too final or giving a firm “No” to others feels too rough, having a place to temporarily store those projects can lessen the emotional burden of prioritization, making it easier to get started.

Really, whatever makes it easy to get started is probably the best method for prioritization. 

But if you have $100 and need some extra accountability, I probably have a window this afternoon when I could come by and rip up your to-do list. 🙂