#031 - The Key to Getting Shit Done: Do Less - BS'ing with Brandi

Welcome to BS’ing with Brandi where my mission is to help you #GetShitDone. I'm your host Brandi Good and today we’re going to talk about how you can’t seem to get all of your shit done and what you can do to stop this problem from happening over and over again.

^{Heads up! This post contains affiliate links, marked with an asterisk. If you sign up through one of those links you won't pay anything extra (sometimes you’ll even get a discount or bonus!), but I'll get a small commission or credit that helps me to keep delivering this awesome free content to you! I only recommend tools that I use and trust. Read my affiliate disclosure here.}

Listen

Subscribe

Search

Looking for a specific snippet of the podcast but don’t have time to listen to the entire thing again? All of my podcasts are now keyword searchable - type the word(s) you’re looking for and then jump to that spot in the podcast!

Shownotes

And what you’re going to notice is that for me, ‘doing less’ actually can mean 3 things:

• Removing things from your to do list - delete them, move them to a ‘revisit in the future’ bucket

• Tricking your brain into thinking you’re doing less but breaking down large tasks/projects into tiny steps
• Outsourcing

January/February

• I started the year with no team members and needed to simplify my 2020 projects - cutting it down to 1 project only!
• I onboarded a VA agency to help with ongoing internal and client work so I could focus on that project and work more on business development.

March

• I took on a new contract that required many more hours than I’d been giving to my existing clients; I had almost all of those existing clients all launching new websites and courses at the same time; and . . . the pandemic :/
• March was a big old mess and I’ll 100% admit I almost didn’t make it through the month. I had to take time off at the end just to prevent a meltdown - luckily I have super compassionate clients. Sometimes doing less is just ‘Do nothing. Full stop.’
• I stopped accepting new clients.

April/May

• My time was not being freed up, and I didn’t want a repeat of March so took a long look at where I was spending my time. Working with the agency had just shifted a lot of my time from ‘doing’ to ‘managing’ so ultimately decided to stop working with them.
• This meant that I also had to scale back the services I could offer to clients, which I had to make myself OK with.

June

• Spur of the moment - rehired a previous VA who barely needed any onboarding, only needed training on things that were brand new or significantly different. She was a fast learner and a fast do-er, so I finally saw that extra time that I’d been hoping for since January.

July/August

• Launch season again! Most of my clients all decided to launch all at the same time.

• To prevent the March Meltdown, I did a much better job at prioritizing exactly what tasks were critical for the launches to succeed and moved everything to the backburner.

September

So here we are in Sept, and all of that backburner stuff is catching up with me and I feel like I’m behind on everything. So in this exact moment here are the strategies am I brainstorming and trying out to get through this period:

• Adjusting my schedule to put high-focus work on times when I know I won’t be interrupted - and yes, for now this means weekends.
• No longer accepting 1:1 clients for ongoing retainer services - consulting and fixed-end-date projects only.
• Outsourcing things to trusted colleagues (even if the income on these is net zero, my clients’ happiness is still pretty valuable in the long run).
• Reducing my meeting availability for non-clients.
• Extending the launch of my own course and committing to do only tiny steps on it each week. Crossing small things off the list is more motivating than seeing a giant “finish course” task sitting in my task list.
• Cutting back on social media - Instagram is not my top performing channel, and since I don’t have the resources to invest in it I’ve taken a break.
• Finding more time efficient ways to add value to members of School for Heartful Entrepreneurs - switching to a monthly challenge from a bi-weekly livestream training/coaching.
• Possibly having guests on the podcast that have their own topics, or moving to a seasonal format.
• Always looking at ways I can repurpose, recycle, or update something previously created to cut down on my time investment when blogging and podcasting.

So out of all of the things I listed, is there 1 or 2 ideas that you could apply to things in your business?

Do you have things that really aren’t critical to have done by the end of the year and you can put them in a 2021 bucket to revisit later?

Do you have things that are just sitting there and you’re making no progress because they seem overwhelming? Can you break them down into baby steps and schedule 1 step per day?

Do you have things that you can outsource with very little time spent training on your part?

What can you do less today in order to do more tomorrow?

That wraps up today’s episode of BS’ing with Brandi. If you enjoyed this topic, you can find more like it at bsingwithbrandi.com, along with show notes and links to any resources mentioned today. While you’re there, feel free to subscribe to future episodes on the platform of your choice, and I wish you all the best getting shit done this week!

Resources Mentioned

• I’m using ClickUp for project & task management

Want more awesome info like this?

Pin it!