Frustrated because to-do list tasks take too long? Here's what to do.
How many times have you said, I'm going to finish something in 30 minutes and it ends up taking all day long?
You end up completely frustrated with yourself, you blame it on yourself…
What if you had the magic secret to estimating how long all your tasks will take you so you don't have to feel behind and flustered ever again?
In this blog post, I'm going to give you the magic secret that you're looking for when it comes to estimating how long things will take for tasks in your business!
Become Aware
First, it's super important to just become aware of, is this problem is happening to you? Do things take way longer than you want them to? It's important to become aware of how you spend your time and what you end up spending your time on for estimating how long things will take you.
When you're not paying attention to how long writing that blog post, scheduling out content for your Instagram or Facebook, interacting with potential clients, then you will continue to be unrealistic about what you put on your to-do list, therefore your output in your business. Which is really the real reason you feel behind, scattered and overwhelmed.
Without becoming aware of how you spend your time, you're going to continue to think that you can send an email newsletter every single week, post every single day on Instagram and Facebook, still have time to polish your offer, attract clients AND do all the other things that actually make your business a business.
How to do that? I would say simple activity, get a Time Tracker app, get a piece of paper, get an Excel spreadsheet going, whatever fuels your fire. Just pay attention to how long things take you in your business for a week or two.
1.5-2X Rule
The next thing I want to ask you is, are you taking the time to estimate how long things will take you?
For example, a blog post, are you putting that into consideration when you are making a to-do list? OR are you flying by the seat of your pants thinking that you can finish eight things on your to-do list today when in reality, each of them takes HOURS to get done?
If you're saying Becca, I don't know how to estimate how long things will take me... That's why we go back to just becoming aware and keeping track of how long these tasks take you on a normal basis and then you'll have a better idea of it.
But, I'm going to share with you some things that you can do to estimate now without taking the time to track and analyze your time over the span of a week or two.
I want to flip that question on its head, so instead of asking how long will that blog post take me, ask yourself is how long do I want to spend on that blog post?
How long do you want to spend on that task?
When you flip that question on its head, you can't say I don't know anymore!
You have to get specific, do you want to spend eight hours on one blog post? Do you want to spend hours, days, weeks, months, maybe years on a task?
No, probably not. You want to get things done efficiently and effectively so you can continue to grow your business.
Things are going to take eight weeks, months, maybe even years, if you are continuing to pile on more and more and more under your to-do list without estimating how long you want to spend on them.
This is where I share with you my magic trick. After I became more aware of how long things were taking me and I did the whole time tracking activity… I realized that things took me about one and a half or two times as long as I wanted to spend on them or how long I thought they should take.
Thanks to my engineering brain!
So when I'm planning my week, I write my to-do list just like you probably do, and then next to each task, I write how long I want to spend on each thing and then I multiply it by one and a half or two.
For example, since I create YouTube videos, I would love to script a month's worth of videos in an hour but, I think that is a lofty goal. It still takes me a little bit longer than an hour to script four videos, so I'll multiply it by two. Then, I schedule in my calendar two hours to script my YouTube videos for the next month.
This little trick will help you estimate how long things will actually take you so you don't have to feel shame about not getting everything done and being super unrealistic about your to-do list.
Again, this is super individualized so I want to encourage you to go back to the exercise of tracking your time. Maybe writing a blog post or scripting YouTube videos will take you three times as much. Or three and a half when you're just starting out and there's nothing wrong with that.
Try not to get caught up in the hustle culture mindset or mode. When you're just starting your own business, you're learning a ton of new things on the daily! Your brain is on overdrive and so when things take a little bit longer, it's okay.
You just want to estimate realistically so you don't stress yourself out and think that you should be doing more when in reality we're learning, we're getting amazing work done on the time frame that we can.
The perfectionist-procrastination cycle
This leads me into the next topic, which is the perfectionist-procrastination cycle. They are super connected. You might have both, one, or the other but it's really important to talk about this when it comes to estimating how long things will actually take you.
I'm bringing this up because it's a huge cycle that I see with my clients and, while these two topics can be talked about in completely individual videos of themselves, about going into why they're there and how to fix them.
But if you're spending hours writing something because you're a perfectionist and you're pouring all of your heart, energy, and soul into this thing, then you probably are experiencing some sort of perfectionism. You probably want to add that into your magic trick right? Things will probably take 3.5 to 4 times longer. Unless you do the work to figure out why perfectionist tendencies are coming out.
The same thing with procrastination, if you tend to put things off and off and off and you don't end up starting until like an hour or two later, then maybe add that in the time that it takes, so you know what you are spending your 24 hours on.
Granted, those are band-aid solutions. I am NOT talking about how to get to the root of them, lovingly solve them and work through them. These are just simple tips that you can use to estimate and be more realistic about your to-do list. I will be doing a video on both of these things because I used to have both of them! However, if you do want to do a little bit of self-coaching around perfectionist or across procrastination tendencies, feel free to just get out a piece of paper right now, stop reading and just write down. Ask yourself, why do you think that you are being a perfectionist when it comes to this task that you are taking hours and hours on? and why are you procrastinating starting things? Just ask yourself why. That's like the greatest question, how to get down to the root and get closer and closer to healing.
If you feel guilty about pushing your tasks back and back, then you need to check out this other post, “3 things that you miss when you write your to-do list” because that blog is really going to get to the root of why you keep pushing your tasks back and why you feel so overwhelmed and overworked all of the time!
If you love this blog post and you got a super awesome tip from it, feel free to comment that tip below. I would love to get to know how this post helped and how are you going to start implementing this!