Hi

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Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where every Sunday I give you something positive or productive for the week ahead.

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This week I want to talk about your to-do list.

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Is everything you’ve written there (or typed in there), actually a thing that you can do? Or are some of those things simply ‘nags’?

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Nags are the little thoughts we all have, that say things like:

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“Oh, I must do something about that!”

“toilet roll. We need more toilet roll”

“appraisals!”

“MUM!”

“ugh… the accounts”

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They can be big things, they can be small things. Often they’re the same thing over and over again – we keep having the thought, we keep doing absolutely nothing about it.

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And then we get smart.

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We write the nag down. We add it to our to-do list. "Hurrah!", we think to ourselves… "Now I'm organised!".

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Wrong.

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Nags should not be on your to-do list at all. When they are, it means that every time you look at your list, you have no momentum and are likely to get stuck. You look at your list and your brain says "What do you expect me to do with that?!"

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You can’t do a nag. You can only do actions.

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The trick is to convert the nags into the two things we really need to get things moving:

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• The next physical action we need to take
• The desired and measurable outcome of the project

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So, “accounts” becomes a project to finalise the accounts by the middle of April, and a next physical action of having a conversation with your colleague to go through the process and agree the timeline.

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“Appraisals” becomes four separate projects, to finalise the appraisals for each of your direct reports, with a next physical action for each.

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And “mum!” becomes “call my sister to talk about mum’s birthday weekend” and a project to celebrate her big milestone with as much love as possible.

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Our brains are lazy. They think in nags, not next physical actions or desired project outcomes. But when we just learn to think just a little more – and a little more clearly – about each thing we’re working on, we quickly find that procrastination is harder, and productivity is easier.

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So back to your to-do list…

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• Are there any items on there that feel stuck?
• Are some of them really ‘nags’?
• Can you define the next physical action and desired project outcome so that you can get it all moving again?

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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PS – there are still a few places left on my 6 Weeks to Ninja programme that starts this Wednesday! So if you want to move from feeling overwhelmed to feeling like a Productivity Ninja, then you just have a couple of days left to take action. I only run this once a year, so now's the time. The tickets are here. Hope to see you on Wednesday.

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