MBA2699 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Not Get Overwhelmed With Everything I Need To Do Every Day?

0:00Welcome to Q &A Wednesday here on the$100 MBA show. This is where I answer your questions about starting, growing, and scaling your business. Today's question comes from Liam. Liam asks, how do I not get overwhelmed with everything I need to do every day? This is a great question, Liam, because I believe that overwhelm is one of the biggest killers of productivity, creativity, and just pure joy in entrepreneurship. The thing is that you need to understand one fundamental rule when it comes to business in general, and that is you will never finish everything, but you can absolutely manage your day so you feel like you're in control and you're making progress.

0:47Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Real quick, if these episodes help you in any way, hit the follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. So that's the first thing we need to establish. You will never finish. You need to understand that finished doesn't exist in business. There's always going to be more to do, more customers, more money to be made, more emails, more tasks, more fires to put out, right?

1:25You're just never going to be finished. You need to just understand that, believe that, and just be at peace with that. The secret isn't about doing everything. It's about doing the right things in the right order. Once you accept that you'll never cross off every single thing in your to-do list in your head, the weight comes off your shoulders, right? You start to relax. you start to mature a little bit. And the question shifts from how do I do it all to what matters most right now. So I want to share with you my system, the system that works for me in hopes that you can give it a try and get some relief.

2:06Okay. It's exactly what I recommend to everybody I work with in the$100 MBA program, in my life, my own team members, everybody that approaches me and says, I feel overwhelmed. This is what I tell them to do. At the end of the day, ideally, at the end of your workday, you do your planning. And I call this a brain dump. It's kind of a great exercise to do at the end of the day for whatever you're going to work on the next day, because you want to just jump in the next day, ready to go, ready to implement. Now, if for some reason you're burnt out or you're right out of time, then make sure you do this the first thing in the morning when you start your workday.

2:45So what is a brain dump? You want to write down everything you think you need to do, either for tomorrow if you're doing at the end of the day or for that day if you're doing in the morning. Big or small, write everything. Don't be critical about what these things are. Just write them all down. So for example, I have on my list, shoot a video ad, right? I also have process payroll with bookkeeper. I have a doctor's visit, gym. I have to go to the gym. Reply to a customer email that was sent to me personally. Record this podcast episode. So you get it. It's just a brain dump of everything I think I need to do.

3:22This gets the chaos out of your head and onto paper or onto your task list on your screen. You can't prioritize what you can't see. If you don't have it out of your head, you don't know what's important or you don't know which order to do them in. The next step is to underline your non-negotiables. These are things that you must do no matter what. And these are basically your high-level priority tasks that allow you to continue to have the life and business you have. So for me, health is always underlined, right? Going to the gym or having to go to the doctor or whatever. This I can't mess around with, right?

3:59This is something that is consistent. I must do. It's non-negotiable. Critical obligations like payroll. I need to do payroll. That's got to be underlined. Another one for me is commitments to other people like a meeting that I agreed to. I need to underline that. These are things I always make sure I get done or I try to do them first because if you skip them, you're either hurting yourself or you're letting someone else down. Now, listen, you know yourself best. If you put off going to the gym at the end of the day and you just don't have the energy to even put on your shoes to go to the gym, then you better put it at the top of the day because it won't happen.

4:35But if you're the kind of person that likes to go to the gym at the end of the day because your brain is totally fried and you just want to go ahead and use your body at the gym instead. You know yourself, do what's best for you so that you get it done. You want to think of these as anchors of your day. Everything else has to fit around them. Next, I want you to circle the activities with the highest ROI, return on investment, the things that actually directly create growth in your business. Ask yourself, if I only did one thing today that moved the needle in my business, what would it be? And that's the top of your ROI list.

5:10Here are some examples. Recording a sales video that will run for months and bring in sales. Launch an ad campaign that's going to increase my marketing and allow me to get more qualified leads. Reaching out to a partnership lead or working on a product that I need to launch so that I can make more revenue. Notice what's not on the list. Tweaking your logo, reorganizing your Dropbox, spending two hours in your inbox, right? No, those things don't really move the needle. Once you've circled the most return on investment activities, you want to rank them in order of highest to lowest in terms of the return on investment.

5:48Then you want to schedule your day like this. Number one, non-negotiable activities. Number two, highest ROI activity. One activity, that the most important thing you have to do that day that's gonna bring in revenue, that's gonna help grow your business. Then the next ROI activity in terms of return on investment. And then everything else that time allows. So everything else goes below that. Now know that you will not cross everything off at the end of the day. Understand that. But in my opinion, the most important thing of the day are the first two, the non-negotiables and the highest ROI activity.

6:24If you accomplish those two things, then that day's a win. That day is successful. Anything on my list that I don't finish today, I then move on to the next day. But I use the same technique, the same methodology, where I start with the non-negotiables. And then I choose the highest return on investment activity, the highest ROI activity from what's left over. And then I say, what's the next ROI activity? And I go on and do the same thing. Here are a few bonus strategies for you. You might want to consider theming your days. I know a lot of people love this. For example, they say Monday is for marketing, Tuesday is for product, Wednesday is for sales.

6:58This keeps your brain in one mode instead of switching. Context switching is very taxing and tiring. I'm not a theme day guy, but some people love this, so you may want to try it. You also want to think about time blocking, assigning chunks of time on your calendar for your work. If it's not blocked out on your calendar, it's probably not going to get done. And this allows you to kind of see milestones. Okay, this time block, I'm going to work on this, then I'm going to have lunch. And then after this time block, I'm going to work on that. So you have clarity of when you're going to do what, and then you also confine yourself to a certain amount of time.

7:32Otherwise, you're going to just just spend as much time as you want on a task. And it might even bleed to the next day. Next, delegate, delegate as much as possible. Anything that you can train somebody to do in five minutes, get them to do it on your team. You can even outsource this to a part time VA. these are tasks I call$10 tasks where they bring in$10 on average to your business. This is like replying to email, scheduling, admin work. At the end of the day, you need to start delegating the stuff that's very time consuming that's not actually bringing in the money. It's required for you to do so that you can run the business, but it's not really top end ROI driven tasks.

8:13I always say you should definitely delegate all your$10 tasks and$100 tasks So you can focus on the$1 ,000 and$10 ,000 tasks, the tasks that bring in$1 ,000 and$10 ,000 in revenue. Like creating your product, like doing a sales webinar. You get it. Last tip, set a hard stop. Overwhelm really grows when you blur the lines between work and life. And I used to not do this rule. I used to just kind of work whenever and as long as I want. And that's not really good because that really encourages burnout. And I burnt out a bunch of times in my career because of that. So especially if you're side hustling, you want to make sure that whatever time slot you're working on your business, that you stick to it as much as possible.

8:55And you force yourself to get what you need to get done in that time law. And you'll be surprised how much you can get done when you hold yourself accountable with time. And I really encourage anybody to get one of these timers and get from Amazon where you can set certain times and just have an alarm. and it's kind of seeing the time tick away kind of encourages you, like, let me stay focused. Let me keep working hard on this. Let me get this thing done. So Liam and everybody who's listening and watching, how do you not get overwhelmed? Let me recap, okay? You wanna, number one, accept the fact that you'll never be finished.

9:28You just need to accept that, okay? Next, you wanna dump all your ideas, all your to-dos on paper or in your note-taking app and just get it out of your head. Then underline all your non-negotiables, then circle and rank the highest ROI activities that are on that list and then do them in that order. That's it. That's simple. And often a simple system is a powerful system because you can repeat it. Overwhelm goes down when progress goes up. When you start feeling like you're getting things done, you're starting to feel good about yourself. And you just need to get a little organized so that you can get a lot more focused.

10:05Thanks for the great question, Liam. If you got a question you want to ask here on Q &A Wednesday, Don't forget to submit it over at 100mba.net slash Q. And I'll answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of business is just discipline. All right. It's just having the discipline to do what's important at any given time and not get distracted with smaller things, easier things. Do the most important thing sometimes. And I would say probably often the most important thing is the hardest thing. And you just got to get disciplined enough to just tackle the most important thing, the most highest return on investment task that's going to help your business first.

10:48Get that done. Move on to the next. Listen, if you are overwhelmed and you're thinking, oh, I'm not sure about this, if I should, you know, use this system, just try it. OK, you've tried your way and you're feeling overwhelmed. Try this way. You'll see what happens. And I'm pretty sure you're going to start to feel better. All right. I will see you in the next episode. Thanks so much for subscribing, listening, watching, and being part of our community.

11:37to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.