You Can't Do It All (And You Shouldn't) - Ep. 27

Speaker A: All right, my business bestie, I have a, uh, quick question for you. How many newsletters are sitting in your inbox right now that you have marked as unread because you definitely want to read them later? How many podcast episodes are queued up that you haven't gotten to yet? How many online courses are sitting in a tab somewhere, ones that you paid for and you fully intend to finish and haven't opened in three weeks? If the answer to any of those is more than you would like to admit, you are exactly where I was a few weeks ago. Uh, welcome back to Small Business Simplified. I'm Karen Velez, and today's episode comes directly from a moment that I had during my morning routine a few weeks back. I sat down m to start my week, and instead of actually starting the week, I spent probably the first 45 minutes to an hour managing the pile. The email pile, the unread but still important pile, the I really want to read this but now is not the time pile. And somewhere in the middle of that, I noticed that I was spending a significant chunk of my week consuming content that was excellent. I mean, genuinely legitimately useful content. But that had nothing to do with what I needed to be working on in my business at that moment. And when I took a really close look at this, I realized I had two separate problems that were making each other worse. I had a little bit of a task prioritization problem where too many things felt urgent and I couldn't really get traction on any of of them. And I had a content consumption problem where I was basically drowning in really good information that I just didn't have the bandwidth to actually use. So today we're going to talk about both of those, and I'm going to kind of walk you through a way that we can sort of manage them, and we will do this together. My main point in all of this is that you cannot focus on everything all at once. I used to think that trying to tackle everything on my to do list all the time was just me being ambitious. And let me tell you, it is not. It's actually a recipe for staying stuck. That is true for your task list. And what I've come to realize is that it's equally true. For your information, diet. So what you're reading or you're listening to or what you're trying to learn right now, choosing what to focus on and deliberately setting everything aside for later is probably one of the most underrated skills in running a tiny business. So let's start with the task side. Because that's where most people kind of feel it first and where it sort of hits the hardest. And I do have a tried and true system for the task side that I covered in the episode on how to manage the tasks in your business. I will leave a link to that in the show notes. But what we have to understand around task management is that you're the only person running your business, right? Or you're running it with one other person. Say maybe you have a virtual assistant or something. Every single thing that needs to happen lands on your plate, right? The client email, the invoice that's overdue, the social post that you would said you would publish on Monday that didn't get done. The website update that you've been putting off, the new tool that someone recommended. And oh yeah, you also meant to revisit your pricing because you haven't looked at that since last fall. Like all of it lands on you all the time and none of it comes with a priority label attached. What happens next is one of two things. Either you try to do all of it, which means you're in constant motion, but you are rarely making real progress on anything because you're jumping between 12 different things instead of just finishing one, or you freeze entirely because the list is so overwhelming that you don't know where to start, and you end up just tackling the smallest, most manageable things just to feel like you're moving. And most times those things aren't the most important things. Neither of these courses of action is actually moving your business forward. They're just keeping you stuck. So the root problem is that when everything feels urgent, that word urgent stops functioning as a signal. Urgency is supposed to mean something. It's supposed to tell you to stop what you're doing because something genuinely needs your attention right now. But if every item on your list is waving that flag at the same time, you don't have a signal anymore. It's just noise. And working from within that noise is exhausting and it's very ineffective. So how do we bring that signal back? M Every week and every month, I want you to ask yourself, what is the one or two things that will make the biggest actual difference in your business right now, given where your business is this month, given what's generating income or what's falling short, or what season you're in, what moves the needle most? For some of you, that's income related. Maybe you have five warm prospects sitting in your inbox that you haven't followed up with and doing that this week could change your cash flow by the end of the month. Maybe you haven't raised your prices in two years and that one conversation with yourself is worth more than anything else that's on your list. For others, this might be systems related. Maybe you're losing two hours every single week to a process that a simple automation could handle. And maybe building that one automation in the next two weeks could save you one, uh, hundred hours over the next year. And for others, it's relationship related. Maybe there's that one client situation that's just gotten weird and addressing it now would prevent a bigger problem later on. Whatever it is for you right now, that's your needle mover right at the top of your list. Work on it first every day until it's done. Everything else goes onto what I call the not this week list. Okay? And I want to be clear about what the not this week list is and what it isn't. It's not a trash pile, right? Good ideas don't go there to die. It's a real list in a real place. Whether that's a note on your phone or a page in your planner or a folder in your task management, wherever you are actually going to go back when the current needle mover is finished. The not this week list basically takes the pressure off without making you lose track of things when you write. You know, research the new scheduling tool on that list instead of your current task list. Well, you've kept the idea with out it, you know, eating up your focus. You're not ignoring it, you're just not working on it right now. And the really big ideas go into a completely separate place that I call the idea vault. I talked about that in a separate episode. Episode. I will also link to that in the show notes. So choosing what task or idea goes on what list is on purpose. Right? We're doing this on purpose. And it that is entirely different from trying to do everything all at once and feeling like you are constantly failing at all of it. Now, let's talk about the sneakier version of this problem. And this is the one that I found myself really struggling with a few weeks ago. And that's the information overload side. We are living truly in a golden era for business education. Right. They are genuinely brilliant newsletters being written by really smart, experienced people who want to help you. Yeah. Sometimes they're also trying to sell you something. And that's okay. You're getting the information for free. There are podcasts like this one, full of practical advice designed for tiny teams. There are online courses, YouTube channels, summits, webinars, communities, all of them are trying to help you build a better business. A lot of it is free or nearly free. Some of it is paid, right? But that is remarkable, and I mean that with full sincerity. The volume of accessible, high quality business education available to a solopreneur or a tiny business owner today is absolutely extraordinary compared to even 10 years ago. But the part of that that I don't think we talk about enough is that consuming all of that is not helping you. Subscribing to everything that sounds useful does not make you better prepared. It actually makes you overwhelmed. I did account a few weeks ago of, uh, the newsletters hitting my business inbox on a daily basis. No fewer than 12 emails every single day were just newsletters. And I had subscribed to every single one of them intentionally. I'd found them, I, uh, read a couple issues, or I liked the creator, I liked them, I signed up. Okay? Every single one of them is a good newsletter. So I don't regret signing up for any of them. But 12 newsletters a day is 60 newsletters a week. I am not joking. And I was not reading 60 newsletters a week. I was opening a handful of them, I was skimming a few more. I was letting the rest pile up in a folder that I had very optimistically named Read this Later, which basically had effectively become a graveyard. And I'm, um, gonna bet that I am probably not alone in this. And the worst part wasn't the unread pile itself. It was more the mental weight of it. The constant background hum of knowing that there were a hundred good ideas sitting in my inbox that I wasn't getting to. Right? That mild fear of missing out on, like, potentially something that could be really, really valuable to my business. Or the low grade kind of guilt, I guess, that, uh, every time I deleted something that I didn't read, uh, like I was somehow was money, even though all of them were for free, right? So here's what I finally said to myself, and this is kind of what I want to offer you now. Not all of that content is for right now. Some of it covers exactly what you need six months from now when you're working on a completely different problem. Some of it covers topics that you already know well enough. Some of it is excellent in general, but genuinely not relevant to where your business is today. And some of it, honestly, is just not serving you the way that it did when you first subscribed. And surrounding all of this is the fact that There is a difference between consuming content and implementing what you learn. You can absorb an idea in 20 minutes. Building the system it describes might take you 10 hours. You cannot do both of those things at full capacity at the same time. When your bandwidth is split between taking in new information and putting your current knowledge to work, neither one gets the attention it deserves. Choosing to implement something to actually do the thing means temporarily narrowing what you're taking in. This includes email, newsletters, blog posts, webinars, courses, all of it. That is what this focus looks like in practice. Subscribing to great content or buying courses or joining communities and regularly consuming great content or completing courses or engaging in communities are completely different things. And you cannot do the second one with 50 things on your list waiting to be read. Okay, you have to choose. So I want you to leave this episode with something that you can do this week to work towards this. Not just, you know, again, have you consume this episode and leave with a general intention to deal with your inbox someday. Right. If you have listened to what I'm saying and you're making this a priority this week, then I will walk you through it. If you've consumed this content and decided this is not a priority this week, then move me to your not this week list and go on with your day. Okay, so the first step to triaging all of this inbound information is to audit what you're subscribed to. Pull up your email, your podcast app, your bookmarks, your course library, wherever all this content is living, and take a quick inventory. Give yourself a realistic mental picture of what you are subscribed to and supposedly supposed to be consuming. Okay, how many newsletter newsletters are there? Um, how many podcast feeds? How many courses that you have in progress or that are waiting to be started? For most tiny business owners, this audit is probably going to turn up more than you realize. This is just the natural accumulation of being curious and being resourceful over time, which is actually a good thing, right? That's a good quality to have. It's good to be a continuous student of your craft or of your business. It just needs to be trimmed down a little bit periodically. Anyway, the second step would be to separate now from not yet, right? Look at each source and ask yourself, is this relevant to what I'm actually working on right now in my business this month or this quarter? If you're focused on marketing this quarter, for example, then newsletters about social media strategy and visibility are a. Now, newsletters about scaling a team or building a franchise model might be Interesting. And it might be something you want to read about and think about, but they are a not yet. Okay, if you're in the middle of tightening up your client systems, a podcast about operations and workflow, that would be a now. A ah, podcast about launching a physical product line is a not yet. Or maybe even a, uh, not ever. The now sources are your active list, right? The not yet sources go into an archive, like a real folder or a bookmark list or a note somewhere, someplace where you will be able to find them when your business focus shifts. So for email newsletters, create a folder called something like Archive Read later and start moving subscriptions to land there instead of in your main inbox. That ah, way, you're not even seeing them, they're not sitting there unread. The difference between this and the pile that you may already have is that you're going to schedule a time to actually check it, right? So once a month, when you're ready to work on whatever those newsletters cover, you'll know exactly where to look, and then you can move them back to arrive in your main inbox. For podcasts, most apps will let you build playlists. So build one that's called now with two or three of the shows that are relevant to your current focus. Everything else can say, stay subscribed, just park them in a different playlist. Maybe M1 that you mark, um, or title as later, right? And then for courses, be straight with yourself, okay? If a course is not relevant to what you are building right now, you do not need to finish it this month. Note where you left off, save the login and give yourself permission to come back to it in the right season. I have signed up for courses knowing full well that I did not have the time to go through it right at that instant. But the price was so good or the bonuses were so compelling that I went ahead and pulled the trigger. But then I archived it to take it later when it was a priority. There's no harm in that, so long as you schedule a time to revisit that priority. Because if we're doing this too often and we're never going back and actually taking those courses, then the guilt of wasted money and not prioritizing them could actually be worse. So just make sure that you have it in your schedule to go back and revisit those. The next thing you want to do is choose your active sources. After you do this triage, you should have a noticeably shorter active list. Now I want you to pick two or three sources. Newsletters, podcasts, a course, whatever combination fits that you are going to actually consume consistently. Right now, just two or three. I know this feels ruthless, but it's not. You're still subscribed to everything else. You're just dropping the pretense that you think you can absorb all of it at the same time. The active list is where your attention goes right now. Everything else is just on deck, waiting for its season. Now, that archive only works if you actually go back to it. So that's step four, Build a recurring monthly reminder. Okay, maybe it's the first Monday of the month, whenever you do your monthly business check ins, right? To do a 15 minute content review, ask yourself, are these still the right active sources for what I'm focusing on right now? And is there anything in the archive that is now relevant because my focus has shifted? This is the step that makes the whole system work. You're not abandoning the newsletters in your archive. You are deferring them to that scheduled check in. Okay, so that that one mental reframe from I need to keep up with all of this all the time to I will come back to this when it's the right time. That is what makes this feel like an actual strategy that you are using for all of this information and not a feeling of avoidance. So before we wrap up, I want to leave you with something. Choosing what to focus on in your task list and in your content queue is not a sign that you are not being ambitious enough or that you're worried about missing out. What it means is that you understand something that takes a lot of business owners years to figure out. Your attention is the most finite resource that you have. Spending it on purpose is just part of the work of running a small business. The newsletters will still be there. The podcasts are not going anywhere. The courses will wait. What won't wait is the thing that you're building right now with the time, the energy and the focus that's currently spread very thinly across everything else. So give yourself permission to close the tabs, archive the pile, pick that needle mover and go work on that. And if you want to do this, work alongside a community of solopreneurs and tiny business owners who are all trying to keep it simple, but also keep it sustainable. Come join us in the growth Table Small Business Collective. We have monthly workshops, practical resources, we've got twice monthly drop in virtual coffees and office hours, and a table full of people who are genuinely rooting for each other in all of this. Okay, no noise, no hustle, culture. Just good work and good company. Head to growthtablesbc.com and I will leave the link in the show notes. You've got this and I am cheering you on. I will see you next Wednesday.