Focus On This Podcast

78. 4 Questions to Clear Your To-Do List

Audio

Overview

Sometimes, just writing down everything you have to do is overwhelming. You feel discouraged before you even begin. And seeing it all in one place still leaves you stretched thin and running from one obligation to the next. But what if it didn’t have to be that way?

This episode is an invitation to reevaluate your to-do list. We’ll walk you through four questions you can ask yourself to stop doing the work that drives you crazy and start making your best contribution to your business. When you do, you’ll have the peace of mind and confidence that comes from knowing you can accomplish what’s required of you.

In this episode, you’ll discover—

  • Why some tasks don’t actually need to get done
  • How to eliminate needless decision making through creating habits
  • Often overlooked opportunities to delegate tasks
  • One practice that will help you stop overestimating how much you can accomplish in a single day
  • Two kinds of tasks you can schedule to relieve stress today

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Episode Transcript

Verbs: Welcome to another episode of Focus on This, the most productive podcast on the Internet, so you can banish distractions, get the right stuff done, and finally start loving Mondays. I’m Verbs, here with Blake Stratton and special guest Larry Wilson. Blake, my friend, how are you? Here we are once again.

Blake: Oh my goodness. I am excited to be here with our friend. Well, he’s my friend. I don’t know what your relationship is with him, Verbs. I won’t speak for you. I assume you have a friendly relationship to Larry. I’m just kidding. We’re all friends with you, Larry. Larry is an OG of the podcast realm here at Michael Hyatt & Company.

Verbs: He definitely is.

Larry: I’m here as the ghost of podcasts past.

Verbs: That’s a very accurate description.

Blake: I was wondering why you were wearing such a flowy gown, but now it kind of makes sense. It sort of adds to the mystique.

Larry: Hey, well, it’s good to be here.

Blake: Well, Larry, for those who don’t know you, you’ve appeared on the podcast before. You’ve been on some other podcasts. I can’t remember the name. Something about leading or winning or something like that.

Larry: Yeah. We used to call it Lead to Win with Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller. Yeah.

Blake: Okay. So you’ve made several appearances. You have a cult following. But for those of you who don’t know who Larry is, Larry, introduce yourself to the people.

Larry: Well, I’m Larry Wilson. I’m one of the content specialists here at Michael Hyatt & Company. Formerly, I’m a semi-regular on Lead to Win podcast and now just do a lot of other content-related stuff, including the occasional visit here on Focus on This.

Verbs: The man is being modest. As a fun fact, you actually used to script and write the show we are currently on as well, Focus on This.

Larry: I more or less gave up on trying to script anything for Blake, but yes, I was involved in creating the content for this show.

Blake: Larry, I never gave up on taking credit for your hard work. So now that you’re here in person, I’m excited to do that in front of your face. Speaking of content, let’s get into it. Verbs, what’s on the docket today?

Verbs: Well, first off, I’d just like to say that it’s finally March. March is a very big month, probably the most important month of the entire year. Birthday month, that is. This month, we’re going to do a little spring cleaning, and we’re starting with our to-do list. So the question I’m posing to you gentlemen as well as to the listeners…Have you ever created a to-do list and just felt overwhelmed the moment you created it? Like, none of this is actually going to get done. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by looking at your to-do list?

Larry: Verbs, I have felt overwhelmed before I got done creating the list.

Verbs: It was swirling in your head, and you knew it had to make it to the paper, and you just lost hope.

Larry: Yes. When I start putting it on paper, it’s like, “I’m going to quit now and go take a nap. There’s no way I can get all this stuff done.” The worst part is it all has to get done. So you just wind up constantly trying to decide what to work on first, what’s most important, what can I possibly put off. It just seems impossible.

Blake: Sure. There’s always a sacrifice to be made. I think when I feel overwhelmed it’s usually this sense of, “What is this going to cost me?” Maybe it’s going to cost me sleep. Maybe it’s going to cost me a weekend. Maybe it’ll cost me the free time I was hoping to have. But there’s always a cost that it feels like, “Man, I wish I didn’t have to pay this, but if I want to get done what I say I need to get done, I guess there’s no way around it.”

Larry: You know, for me, it’s sort of winds up feeling like you have some invisible gun to your head. That somehow someone is making you do all this stuff. I have to get all this done or else. And I never quite define the “or else,” but there’s a sense of urgency about it, especially once it’s written down on paper.

Blake: Or else the syndicate is going to cut the hard line to the mainframe, and they’re going to get access to the files, and the whole country’s security is going to be at risk. So that’s just my Jason Bourne scenario that I live my life at. I constantly have that soundtrack when I’m looking at the to-do list.

Larry: Well, as Verbs pointed out, Blake, I am a little bit more old school, so I don’t think of a Jason Bourne scenario. I just think somehow, I’m getting called to the principal’s office or something. That something bad is going to happen if I can’t find a way to get all this stuff done.

Verbs: Yeah. I think one of the things I don’t look forward to when creating a to-do list is knowing that each to-do list task has the potential of spawning more to-do lists from that one task, which again is like immediate overwhelm. Like you mention, Larry, I might just tap out and take a nap and finish off the day that way.

But the good thing here is we’re going to talk about some of this today, because not everything on your to-do list actually needs to be done. Or at least, not by you. So we’re going to talk about shifting from trying to accomplish your impossible to-do list to actually reevaluating it.

Blake: This is how you get to the point of feeling in control. There’s something really powerful when you feel like you’re controlling your to-do list rather than the other way around, when you feel like, “I can actually make a choice to focus on the things that are greatest impact, that are highest leverage.” When you sustain that for not just a day or an afternoon but week after week, all of a sudden, your progress on those big goals, your progress at work, starts to really ramp up rather than you feeling like you’re being held hostage by this overwhelming list.

Larry: Yeah. Because the truth is that all those things that seem so urgent, they don’t actually all have to all get done or they don’t all have to all get done by you. So there really are some ways around this, these things that just seem to take over your life. There are ways to get that list pared down to a manageable size. That’s what we want to help with today.

Blake: Before we go further, I want to acknowledge that you may feel already when we start talking about, “Hey, you don’t have to do it all. Other people can do it,” maybe you feel something rising up of, “You don’t get it. You don’t get my situation. My list really does have to all be done. It’s all overdue. It’s all urgent.”

I want to start by saying the biggest obstacle we face when it comes to making this shift of my to-do list owns me versus the other way around, I own my list, is the unseen limiting beliefs that keep us in this pattern of thinking that’s leading to this overwhelming to-do list.

So rather than putting on the scuba gear and going deep into why we all have these terrible beliefs, we’re going to give you something very practical. We actually have dialed in some questions that will allow you to unlock the answers you need for your unique situation. Hopefully, you can take these questions today, put them to use, and unlock some strategies that’ll work for you to start taming your to-do list.

Verbs: What do you think would be the first question we would need to ask ourselves?

Larry: Can I eliminate this item from my list? Because truly, a lot of the things we find ourselves doing simply don’t need to be done. It may be just no longer necessary or not important or doesn’t serve you well or serve you in your current role, or since some circumstances may have changed in your life, there are a lot of things you do, maybe every day or every week, that you can just stop doing. It’s not against the law. You can just stop doing it. That will take a little bit of the pressure off of your time and off your to-do list. Blake, have you ever done that? You just quit doing something and nobody noticed?

Blake: Yeah. I stopped coming to the podcast recordings for a few weeks, and people were like, “Why is this going way smoother than normal?” Eventually, that caught up to me. But no, for me, I had to ask permission. At my job, there are certain things. I’m trying to think of a specific example. This is maybe something people aren’t thinking of off the top of their heads, but rather than a specific task, sometimes there are meetings.

So there was this standing meeting our sales team was having on Fridays. I realized that as my role had grown and shifted that I wasn’t really bringing much to the meetings. I didn’t have much takeaway. So I just said, “Hey, team, is it okay if I actually just remove myself from these meetings, because I don’t know that I actually need to be here anymore. Is that all right?” They were like, “Yeah. I mean, that would be amazing.” No. They were fine with me not showing up to those meetings.

So it could be a specific task. In my instance, it was a meeting. Sometimes it’s even worse than a task, because you can’t necessarily optimize for that 30-minute meeting. It’s always going to take the 30 minutes on Friday. So right then, every Friday, I have 30 more minutes than I used to have just by asking that question.

Larry: You know, I think it’s worth pointing out, Blake, that doesn’t have to be like a once for all, “I’m out of this meeting,” but there are occasions where you can just opt out of a meeting that week and take an item off your to-do list. Or follow the no-agenda-no-meeting rule. Don’t all get together just because it’s Friday at 2:00. But if there’s no business to do, no decision that needs to be made, just cancel the meeting. It takes it right off your list, frees up 30 minutes or 60 minutes, and that’s a huge relief just to eliminate it.

Verbs: Larry, I’m aiming this one at you. Are there tasks you feel like even in your home life you’ve been able to just eliminate? Because it sounds just liberating to say, “Ah, I don’t have to do this anymore, and I shall not.” Then kind of go on with life. But do you feel like there’s something that’s going to be missed if that actually happens?

Larry: Yeah. I used to take a shower every day, but since COVID I’m down to once about every two weeks.

Verbs: Thanks to the pandemic, no need. Save on those utility bills also.

Larry: Yeah. I used to put all kinds of pressure on myself over certain things, Verbs, that were just for me. I was the only one making myself do it. We talk and have talked on this podcast a lot about morning routine, evening routine, startup routines, and I got to a point one time not long ago, my morning routine was out of control. I needed like three hours. Who has that kind of time? I’m empty nest. I don’t even have three hours in the morning.

But I stopped doing something that I’d been doing for a long time, and I enjoyed it. It had its day. It had its season in my life. That was studying French, because I was learning the French language. It was fun. My son-in-law is fluent in French. We had fun doing that together. I was able to hold a little bit of conversation.

But I came to the point where I just don’t have the time, or a more accurate way to say it, I’m going to choose not to spend my time on this pursuit, and gave myself permission to just stop. That freed up at least 30 minutes a day, plus even more freeing than the time was that emotional lift of saying, “All right, it seems like I really should be doing that. I really should be working on flash cards. Or I really should be listening to a French podcast or something.” It was great. It had its time, and now it’s done. I’ve freed myself of that obligation.

Verbs: All right. So that was question number one. Can I eliminate it? Question number two…Can I automate it?

Blake: This is maybe my favorite one.

Verbs: Is it? I think I would’ve guessed that, Blake. Not that automate always means apps and technology, but I know you’re an apps guy, and you figured out multiple ways to automate some of your tasks.

Blake: Sure. Yeah. Some of my closest friends are robots, so I’m definitely into this. When we think about automating, there’s something that I think, Larry, it was probably you or something you had written that cued me into this being more than just apps or more than just technology. But sometimes there’s automation that is decision automation.

So you mentioned your morning routine in that last example, for instance. In a sense, that is a form of automation, because you make a one-time decision. Let’s say, in the beginning of the quarter, you do an audit on your morning ritual. You make a decision. “Here’s what I want to do.” Then that’s it. Part of the reason tasks feel overwhelming is because you underestimate how long something takes. The reason things take so long is because there are so many micro decisions, so many starts and stops and interruptions that happen.

Larry: That’s really true.

Blake: Before you even think about, “Can a robot do this?” or, “Is there an app for that?” definitely I can give some examples of that in my life. I’m a big fan of apps and software and all that, but just think about the decision fatigue. When I start my day, I can basically get a lot of things done, and it’s on autopilot. So the decision fatigue, that toll on my energy, is not there. My brain is literally burning fewer calories doing things I’ve “automated” into a ritual.

Verbs: Nice.

Larry: Yeah. That’s so true. That’s one of the reasons I love my morning routine. I get the things done I’ve decided are important, and I literally don’t ever think about them. That decision is already made. Another thing. This involves technology, and it’s in the personal realm for me, but I think I was actually the last person in the United States to sign up for online bill pay.

Verbs: Thank you for saying that, Larry.

Larry: When I realized how much time I was spending getting paper bills in the mail and looking them over and saying, “I don’t know if it’s right or not. I guess I’ll just pay it…” Because what are you going to do with your electricity bill? Are you going to go out and audit the meter? They tell you how much it is, and you pay it. So that saved me a great deal of headache and fatigue.

Now that I’m in a stage in life where I’m helping my parents manage some of those things, it’s twice the work, but honestly, it doesn’t take any more effort from me in order to accomplish that for another household, because I just set it up, and it runs. Of course, I do periodically check it and audit the results and so on. It took a really loathsome chore off of my plate, and I’m so grateful.

Blake: Automate is going to require a little bit of a ramp-up period, a little bit of strategic thought, but man oh man, it will earn you compound interest. It’s almost like a budget. If you take away a little bit, “Oh yeah. We don’t get to spend as much this month,” but guess what? That money is going to grow and grow and grow as the months go.

The same thing with email templates and automation. So for example, the software we use on our team will recognize when I’ve copied and pasted some text from another email. It’ll say, “Hey, do you want to make a template out of this?” I’m like, “Yeah. I do.” So it’s even kind of automating the automation process for me.

You may think you’re sending a lot of unique responses. You’re probably not. There are probably, at most, 20 different scenarios you’re responding to 80 percent of the time or more. That’s 20 email templates that it’s just as simple as copying and pasting from your sent archive. Then just start there, and you’ve probably reduced your time in email by 50 percent within the first month of using that. I mean, it’s a simple strategy, but, man, if you’re overwhelmed by email, I can’t recommend that enough.

Verbs: Yeah. That’s huge and revolutionary. If you’re not doing that, please do what Blake said.

Blake: Another one along those same lines is scheduling. I feel like this has become more and more commonplace, where I think five years ago, if you sent someone a scheduling link, it’s like, “Well, I’m just supposed to click on the link here?” When I’m interacting with someone’s assistant or some person, and they’re like, “Well, what about Thursday at 9:30?” I’m like, “Are we really going to go back and forth for 12 emails? Just go to my link, bro.”

Verbs: That’s your new tee shirt.

Male: That’s the most anger I have heard out of Blake. That was a real sincere level of emotion.

Blake: This is really close to home.

Verbs: This is your new nickname. Hit the link, bro. #hitthelinkbro. Blake Stratton.

Blake: But it’s one of those things where I think there is… Verbs kind of voiced this fear of, “Well, is this disingenuous, or whatever?” It’s all in how you frame it. For me, the way I say it is, if I’m emailing people who are potentially going to spend tens of thousands of dollars with our company, it’s important they feel like I value them. I typically don’t call them bro unless we’ve earned that level of relationship.

But I’ll say, “Hey, if you want to send me some times you’re free, feel free to do that, or send me a message. But I really value your time, and I want you to help you as soon as I can. So the fastest and easiest way for us to connect is for you to just click this link.”

You can set this app… We have a paid version of it now, but Calendly is a great example. There is a dozen out there now. They are free services that will save you so much scheduling time, and they also help you on the back end, because they can send the person reminders for you. You don’t have to check in and confirm. You know, “Hey, are we still on?” It all happens automatically. It saves a world of time.

Larry: I don’t want to step on our next point here, guys, but when I get into that scheduling thing, the first thing I do is say, “Would you send me a link?” Because if we make an appointment, one of us is going to have to send a link. I’d rather it be you.

Verbs: That’s how it works. I’ll remember this, Larry.

Larry: I think what you touched on a minute ago, Blake, is that the emotional kind of toll or the irritational toll of all these teeny little things, they really add up. It’s like that squeaky faucet, or the shower curtain that’s just sort of half off, and every time you go to get in, you have to put it back it up again, and you think, “Ugh! I have to do something about that.”

When you finally break down and just do it…set up the automation and have it running…you will feel so much better not having those ugh moments constantly throughout the day. It really does make your day go better.

Verbs: All right. So that was question number two. Can I automate it? Moving to question number three. I love this one, guys. Can I delegate it? If you don’t mind, I’m going to take the lead here.

Now we’re talking this is more of a home task thing. There’s something about that threshold in fatherhood, or parenthood maybe, when your children become of the age to tackle the task of doing the dishes. There’s something magical that happens. Orchestras from the heavenlies begin to play, because what was previously your task to do and handle is now passed down to your children. Now it may take a while for them to get it right or to your specifications, but man, the delegation of the dishes in the Boyer household has been magical, indeed.

Larry: Can I tag on that, Verbs?

Verbs: Please do.

Larry: Because I want to let you know and let some of our listeners know that that magical age doesn’t last forever. There comes a time when they not only resent doing the dishes, but they actually grow up and leave the house. Then you are right back where you started, my friend. You are standing at the sink.

Verbs: With fewer dishes.

Larry: With fewer dishes. That’s right.

Verbs: Maybe even paper dishes at that point.

Larry: I learned this with lawn mowing and found myself going from enjoying mowing the lawn to having kids to teaching them to mow to having a big yard I never had to touch to me pushing a lawn mower again. That’s full circle in the worst possible way. What I found out is that another form of delegation is to outsource. I simply pay my grandson $10 a week, and he mows the lawn for me. I would challenge everybody’s thinking on this, because I know everybody is thinking, “I don’t have anyone to delegate to, and I don’t have the funding to outsource.”

I think that can be another limiting belief, because there are people around you who may be able and willing to take tasks from you and may actually enjoy doing them, and it may help them to have control over the task, and it frees you of the burden of doing it.

I think calendaring, as we’ve talked about just a bit ago, is one of them. If there’s somebody who does calendaring for your unit or your department, let them do it. By all means, give them all of that you can, because it takes something off of your plate, and it’s one fewer thing for you to do. There are ways to delegate even if you don’t have staff reporting to you.

Blake: Larry, I want to jump on what you just said there. Even if you don’t have someone reporting to you, there are ways to delegate. You mentioned one. Maybe someone serves the team as a whole.

Another example is you have not because you ask not. When someone sends a task your way, you could always say, “Hey, I’m really committed to hitting my goals. My calendar is pretty packed. Is there any way that someone else could tackle this?” You never know. The worst you can hear is, “No.” Guess what? You haven’t lost anything. Here’s a snorkel, Larry. I’ll put on my full oxygen tank here.

Larry: I brought my snorkel just in case. So I’m ready.

Blake: I saw the flippers in the background. But to go deep on this, one of the reasons people don’t delegate is because they say, “Well, I don’t have anyone to delegate to. I can’t afford that. It’s simply not possible.” Before they ever get to tap into their own creativity, they’ve short circuited the process with that decision.

I think what is tremendously helpful is acting as if that weren’t true. Let’s say someone magically appeared who worked for you. Let’s say the budget for delegating that task appeared to you. What would have to be done in order to hand that task off?

I’ll share a real-life example of this. I may have shared this on the podcast before, but it’s just one that comes to mind. I don’t have anyone reporting to me. This was about three months into working with Michael Hyatt & Company. I’m on the sales team. There’s an aspect of my job that really drives revenue that I feel particularly qualified for, and then there’s about 20 percent of my time, maybe even more depending on the month, that is really difficult for me to do.

This was around lead generation and lead follow up and cleaning through our CRM and processing old leads that maybe had gone cold to generate some new conversations. I don’t like doing it. I’m not particularly good at it. It’s exhausting, and the fruit, honestly, wasn’t that much.

However, there is some fruit. There’s something there. So what I decided to do, once I recognized that, was design a process for basically looking at what I was already doing and kind of, “Okay, if I were to delegate this, I would have to coach someone through how to do it. Well, I do this or do this or do this. Here’s what you need.”

Two things happened. First, I realized, “Oh, this process could be optimized. It could be automated. There are things I am doing I actually don’t even need to do.” So right there before I delegated, the process got shorter and easier for me.

The second thing that happened was I realized, “I actually don’t think it’s going to cost that much compared to what we could potentially get out of this.” So then I brought this process, this idea, to my boss, and said, “Hey, I don’t know if there’s a budget for this, but it appears that we could probably contract someone to do this, even five or ten hours a week, and it would free up a whole work day for me but probably yield a much greater result. What do you think?”

He’s like, “I think that’s a great idea. We can’t do it this month.” But guess what we did two months later? Boom! We got that contractor. Now here we are two years later. It’s a full-time position at Michael Hyatt & Company.

Larry: Amazing.

Blake: And it serves multiple people on our team, and it’s probably going to become another position here shortly. If we can go back up to the surface… But before you find yourself saying, “I can’t afford it,” whatever, go through the exercise. What would have to be true for me to delegate this, and what would happen if I could afford it? What would I do next? Just going through that mental exercise, you would be shocked at the possibilities that emerge.

Larry: I love that story. So saying, “No, there’s nobody who can take this task,” that may be a limiting belief for sure.

Verbs: All right. That was question number three. Can I delegate it? Question number four is…Can I schedule it?

Larry: You know, I have a confession to make on this one. I recently learned this and put it to work, and I’m a little embarrassed it took me this long, but I’ve had one of these tasks. I know no one else out there is going to relate to this, because everyone else loves to do expense reports. They live for it. It’s that time of the week where they just love to get a fresh cup of coffee and sit and find those receipts and figure out, “What was that for? What meeting was that?”

Well, I think everybody hates that, and I do too. I would just wait until the reminder popped up on my calendar, “This is due today,” or actually more usually when the accounting/finance department would send me a note, saying, “Your expense report was due yesterday. Could you please do it today by the end of the day?”

Verbs: Grace. Grace.

Larry: Do you know what I figured out? The whole task goes a lot better and a lot smoother, more productive, efficient, and on time, and frees me to do other things most of my week when I block out a specific time to do my expense report, put it on my calendar, and then I never feel like I have to rush through it like I’m taking time away from something else. It’s important. It has to be done. I’m the one who needs to do it. When I set aside time, the whole thing just goes a lot better, and it gets done.

Blake: The most powerful part of this, I think, is clarifying what it means for you to be busy, clarifying what it means for your schedule to be full. Part of the reason our to-do lists are overwhelming is because we’ve made agreements either with ourself or with somebody else. It usually goes something like this. “Hey, Blake, do you think you could do this for me?” Or, “When do you think you could get that done by? We could really use your help on this.”

Then what do I do? I pull up Google calendar, and I look at tomorrow. “Oh, there are no meetings scheduled in the afternoon. Yeah. I can do that.” We just look for those gaps in our virtual calendar. Then before we know it, the day comes, and there’s this huge, long list. When is it all going to get done?

So this is a great tip to schedule out your days. In fact, I would recommend copying whatever is in your calendar on a day-to-day basis into the agenda section of your Full Focus Planner if you’ve got one, in the Daily Page. If you don’t have a Full Focus Planer, I would recommend wherever you keep your to-do list, right beside it, have a list of your appointments.

But then go ahead and think through your Big 3. Think through your other tasks and go, “When is that actually going to get done?” and then go ahead and write it in. Maybe that’s not something you have to do every day in perpetuity, but boy, it is super helpful if you’re struggling with this overwhelm of, “Gosh, I’m so much busier than I thought I was.”

Verbs: Right. I think, too, it’s fair to say there are some tasks you won’t be able to necessarily automate or delegate, but I think this frees you from some of those ugh tasks Larry was talking about, because you know it’s coming down the pike. If you just slow down for a minute and schedule it, then you can prepare your mind so it won’t be so overwhelming when you actually get to that task, and it becomes that thing you dread.

So give yourself an opportunity to free yourself from some of that. Like Blake suggested, find a space in your Full Focus Planner, whatever your calendar app you use, and say, “This is the day I’m going to do this task.” You can kind of go into it with a clear head.

Larry: It also puts a box around some of those things that you may get invited to do that you maybe would like to do, it would be good to do, but you don’t always have time. I put a lot of that stuff on Mondays, especially Monday afternoon. If it doesn’t get done on Monday afternoon, well, the next opportunity is not Tuesday morning. The next opportunity is next Monday afternoon. That puts a limit on how much time I can spend on things that are lower leverage for me.

Blake: That’s a great tip. One last tip, if I can. If you feel like, “Well, my tasks are kind of all over the place. How do I know? I don’t want to schedule a 15-minute task here.” When in doubt, schedule two kinds of tasks maybe for an hour to start. Schedule a block for kind of loose admin.

Then just schedule a block or two of time that’s just called buffer in your calendar. It’s just a catch-all where you can’t be overscheduled so you can kind of collect those loose, seemingly random tasks. Again, to use the financial budget as an analogy, if you have some buffer, you feel safer going into things, so if a disaster happens, if a fire happens, you’re okay. Besides scheduling the specific task, when in doubt, schedule a little bit of buffer so that overage of things can fall into it.

Verbs: Because what gets scheduled gets done.

Blake: Verbs, did you just think of that off the top of your head? That was genius.

Verbs: I wish I did, but that is not the case, my friend.

So the good news is you don’t have to be held hostage by your to-do list. You can make your work more manageable by leveraging the power of elimination, automation, delegation, and scheduling. Blake, Larry, any final thoughts for the Focus on This listeners?

Larry: I think my final thought for our team today is the roof will not fall in. When you stop doing something, the world won’t end. Your mother will still love you. You’ll still have your job. There are a lot of things that can be removed from your to-do list, and you’re going to be just fine. So get past that limiting belief that you have to do everything you always did. You may find out that’s just not the case.

Blake: I love it. Thank you, Larry, for joining us, dispensing your wisdom. We appreciate it here. You’ve gained, I guess, quite a few people into this Larry Wilson cult following.

Larry: Well, it’s been a pleasure to be here today, Blake, and be back with you guys on Focus on This. Thanks, everybody, for joining us here on Focus on This.

Verbs: This is the most productive podcast on the Internet, so please share it with your friends. Remember to use #focusonthispodcast.

Blake: We’ll be here next week with another great episode.

Larry: Until then…

All: Stay focused!