Create Your Business – Tackling the to-do list

If your to-do list goes on for pages or is impossible to manage you may be coping with a ‘lifetrap’ of ‘unrelenting standards’. Lifetraps are ways we, as children, learn to cope with the interactions around us. They were necessary then but can become very limiting as we grow. There are 18 of them all together (see below for more info) but the that one might be a cause of that un-ending To Do list is ‘Unrelenting Standards’.

The trouble is with this life trap running we actually can’t see that what we expect is a little over the top. Or a lot!

If you are recognising yourself here’s a way to start to undo this pattern and manage an unrelenting to-do list:

1. Go through your list and give each item a stress score out of 10 with 10 being major meltdown material. Now, looking at the jobs that are over 5/10 stress – can you break any of them down into smaller jobs to cut down the stress?

2. Try to keep all jobs in a day under 5/10. Make sure that when you look at the day – from a time perspective – it still stays under 5/10 stress for you.

3. Schedule in no more than one item over 5/10 stress in a day. If you suffer from anxiety this is really important – those items over 5/10 are often the source of anxiety and panic.

4. Check out your day and then cut your jobs by half. Like packing for a holiday – we all know how hard that is but it does leave room for new purchases. This will leave room for those unexpected happenings or maybe even stopping to eat lunch!

5. Keep this up for several weeks before upping the ante. None of the “yup, I can do that now, let’s do more” during the second week of this…. not only does it takes about 6 weeks to learn a new habit (the habit of reasonableness here!) but there can be other lifetraps fueling this need to keep on doing, for example fear of rejection or not pleasing others.