Friday Free-For-All

Welcome to The Sunday Starter, a bi-weekly email for busy working professionals who want to start taking back control over their lives.

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Every human being has the same amount of time each day to do what they choose.

→ The question that itches at us often is “Which task should we focus on?”

Sometimes, this can be a difficult question to answer.

Most of the time, the answer is simple but the action of doing what we should be doing brings about resistance, procrastination, and an overall fear of starting.

To get ahead of this, we must create a boundary.

I want to share a simple one with you today that will work wonders.

It’s called the “Friday "Free-for-all”.

When we think about the tasks that need to get done we can typically separate them into two buckets; the repetitive mundane tasks we must do and the more creative thought-provoking problems we have the opportunity to solve. I like how Seth Godin labels these as Chores vs Initiatives. (he had a wonderful blog recently about this - read it here)

→ Tell me if this sounds familiar…

We err on the side of getting the chores done first because those “have to” get done or at least we tell ourselves that. In reality, we are delaying the important and rewarding work out of resistance.

→ This is why I created the “Friday Free-For-All”. 

I was becoming a slave to the “To-do” list and pulling from that list, from time to time, as the more important work got difficult. It was a way to escape that work for the moment.

As I spoke about before, I have my “Today” list of 1-3 items that are the most important items to focus on today. I write those out before I go to bed and prioritize completing them the next day.

Then, I have my “To-do” list which consists of all the excess stuff that comes up in my head throughout the day that also has to get done at some point. These fall into the quadrants of the “Not Important-Urgent / Not Important-Not Urgent” Eisenhower Matrix we discussed in a prior newsletter (read it here as a refresher)

What I used to do was tackle a “To-do” list item as it came up which would inevitably distract me from the work I was already focused on.

Not only was that unproductive at the time, by switching from one task to another took up a lot of my creative energy and took longer to regain focus. The research suggests that ”even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40 percent of someone's productive time.” (article)

→ That’s how the “Friday Free-For-All” was born.

I use Fridays as my “get all the shit done I’ve wanted to do to procrastinate from the other more important tasks” day instead of prioritizing those at the time they randomly dropped on my plate.

→ Your day might not be Friday.

→ Your tasks won’t be like mine.

→ You may structure it differently.

That’s perfectly okay as the goal is to set yourself up for long-term success by bucketing out your tasks into Chores vs Initiatives and then pick a day/time to get all the Chores done in rapid succession.

Here’s the fun part, many of those items that land as “To-Dos” on a Monday end up becoming changed or removed altogether saving you valuable time.

The chores list is shortened without you doing anything other than waiting. 😉

It's challenge time once again!

My challenge this week is simple.

→ See if you can bucket your “initiatives” and your “chores” list.

That’s all.

You may still check some of those chores off throughout the week and that’s fine.

Let’s first set your mind up to recognize patterns and make decisions on how to categorize tasks.

From there, we can start to decide what to do with them.

→ Stay slow and build momentum.

That’s a great place to start.

What’s Coming Next:

Next time, we’ll start to FOCUS on building growth loops to move faster while staying on a clearer path forward.

Thanks again for your support with this newsletter.

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🙏 One of the coolest things about building the Just Get Started platform over the last several years is the number of interactions with new and interesting people who are on the cusp of getting started or early in their journey.

What are you starting that you are excited about?

If I can support you in any way, please let me know. You can reply to this email and let me know what’s going on in your world. I’ll try to help where I can!