Your Homework Is Due

Remember homework? The worst bit wasn’t doing it. It was knowing you hadn’t done it yet. You carried that around with you everywhere.

I’ll be honest, I still carry a version of that in business. If something’s been sitting on my to-do list for three or four days, it’s in real danger of just disappearing. Not because it wasn’t important. It was there for a reason, but I just didn’t do it, and time going by made it feel less important than it actually was. Does that ring any bells?

Here’s how I deal with it now. Every day, I put the hardest thing first. And “hardest” almost always means the same thing, something that’ll make a client’s journey easier, or their life a bit better. That’s genuinely where the money is. It’s never in cutting your prices.

If I can get someone else to do it, I will. If I can’t, and it has to be me, I break it down into six or seven tiny pieces. Then I do one piece, and I actually congratulate myself for starting. I know, congratulating myself like I’ve just tied my own shoelaces. But it works, because once I’ve started, I nearly always finish the whole thing.

The best part isn’t even finishing it. It’s not carrying it around in the back of your mind anymore, not wasting energy telling yourself you’ll do it later.

That’s a really great way to run a business. And it does more than just clear your list. Your team notices. When they see you tackling the hard thing first instead of putting it off, that’s what winners look like, and it rubs off on everyone around you.

So today, I hope you and I are both doing our homework, picking the thing you’ve been avoiding, putting it first, and getting started.

If there’s anything I can ever do to help you or your business, you know where I am.