April 4, 2024
198 - How to choose when you have lots of ideas
What do you do when you have a TON of ideas and all of them feel like they need your attention? How do you sort them, prioritize them, and schedule them?
Thanks to listener Leah W. for submitting this week’s podcast topic! This is a timely one for us as of recording because we’re overflowing with ideas for our two businesses (Teachery and Wandering Aimfully). And, even with our advantage of being a 2-person operation, we’re still finding it hard to carve out time for every idea.
So what do we do? Well, that’s what we discuss in this ep! We’ll cover our signature “Big Ass List™” and then go through the steps to get your ideas out of your head and planned on your calendar to get done in a methodical way.
🗣️ Send us a voice memo for ep #200! Head to podcast.wanderingaimfully.com and leave a voicemail with when you started listening to our podcast and a favorite episode, memory, or note to share. Thank you!
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Caroline: Welcome to Growing Steady, the show where we help online creators like you build a calm business, one that's predictable, profitable, and peaceful. We're your hosts, Jason and Caroline Zook, and we run Wandering Aimfully, an un-boring business coaching program, and Teachery, an online course platform for designers. Join us each week as we help you reach your business goals without sacrificing your well being in the process. Slow and steady is the way we do things around here, baby.
[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers. That's you. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:38] Caroline: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:40] Jason: Ooh, a triple welcome.
[00:00:40] Caroline: Once in my life, I have started the podcast.
[00:00:43] Jason: That's pretty great.
[00:00:43] Caroline: In my own voice.
[00:00:44] Jason: And you didn't even have to use our catchphrase. You just went straight into a triple welcome, which...
[00:00:48] Caroline: I always forget our catchphrase. I made it up. It's so stupid and I forget it.
[00:00:52] Jason: Yeah, it's okay. We don't need to rehash. We've talked about the catchphrase before. I do want to give an immediate first update for everybody who has been curious.
[00:01:00] Caroline: Yes.
[00:01:00] Jason: There have been a lot of comments in my DM's, a lot of emails coming through. I've been paged so many times about this. I have purchased a stand mixer. Yes, I will be taking my baking to the next level. I have been hand kneading Japanese milk bread rolls, cinnamon roll recipes. You don't really need a stand mixer to make cookies. Those are just you just mix it with together. But I am waiting for it to come in the mail. But I also ordered a Swedish one, which is made for bread because the standard KitchenAid, as you know, and all the listeners know, like, it's like the default stand mixer that people have. For me, I was just like, no, I'm not gonna be like everybody else.
[00:01:43] Caroline: Of course, this is very indicative of your personality.
[00:01:46] Jason: I went down the rabbit hole of, like, which stand mixer is best for bread. And many older women on YouTube told me that it's this one.
[00:01:54] Caroline: That's your authority source.
[00:01:55] Jason: Ankarsrum.
[00:01:56] Caroline: If there was a baking authority...
[00:01:58] Jason: Yes.
[00:01:58] Caroline: It's, like, Nana making cookies.
[00:01:59] Jason: It is for sure.
[00:02:00] Caroline: If you go to Nana and you say, what standing mixer should I get?
[00:02:03] Jason: I happily told my mom that I'm finally buying a stand mixer. I've never owned one. And she said, great. If the business stuff doesn't work out, you can always fall back on being a baker. And I wrote back and I said, that's not true because I would eat all the profits. So unfortunately, don't think that's actually the case.
[00:02:17] Caroline: Yeah, actually that's my new business motivation is we got to get this whole thing, like, really sustainable and working for the long run because I can't have you...
[00:02:25] Jason: Just eating gluten constantly.
[00:02:27] Caroline: Going to try and be a baker because we're not going to make it. Missed opportunity for that company not to make a standing mixer brand called Sweet-ish.
[00:02:36] Jason: Right. Because they're Swedish.
[00:02:37] Caroline: Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
[00:02:41] Jason: Let's go ahead and move into the episode. I think now that everyone's gotten that update. Once I have it in my possession, I will... I'll share with everybody my first ever using a stand mixer.
[00:02:49] Caroline: What's the first thing you're gonna make?
[00:02:50] Jason: Cinnamon rolls.
[00:02:51] Caroline: Okay.
[00:02:52] Jason: You got to. You gotta christen the stand mixer with the thing that it was made for. Then it'll make bread.
[00:02:57] Caroline: Cue Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made For?".
[00:02:58] Jason: What's really ironic about this is that I make sourdough bread every single week of my life.
[00:03:02] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:03:03] Jason: But it's like a no knead recipe. It's just you do some stretch and folds, which, you know.
[00:03:07] Caroline: No knead, there's so many puns in baking. My God.
[00:03:09] Jason: Yeah. This is why you should also become a baker. You can use my stand mixer.
[00:03:13] Caroline: How about I'm just a baking assistant and I just say all the puns?
[00:03:16] Jason: Okay, fantastic.
[00:03:16] Caroline: And I test the recipes.
[00:03:18] Jason: All right, you wanna give a shout out to Leah for submitting this topic idea to our podcast?
[00:03:22] Caroline: Yes, of course I do. Thank you to Leah for submitting this idea to our podcast.
[00:03:27] Jason: Great job. Wow.
[00:03:28] Caroline: Well, as the words came out, I was like, well, that's exactly what Jason just said. But we...
[00:03:32] Jason: Hold on. Try it again. Let's just. Yeah, well, like it never happened. Try it your own way.
[00:03:36] Caroline: Okay.
[00:03:37] Jason: Yeah.
[00:03:37] Caroline: Big shout out to Leah for submitting this question. We both saw it and thought, this is a great idea for a podcast. That felt different.
[00:03:44] Jason: That was pretty good. All right, great. Yeah. Okay, wonderful.
[00:03:48] Caroline: Leah's question is, I'd love your thoughts on what to do when you have too many self proclaimed good ideas for improving your business. You're really excited about all of them, but you know that doing all of them at once would probably make you do all of them a little bit shitty.
[00:04:01] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:02] Caroline: And you can't decide which one to prioritize and which one to set aside slash let go.
[00:04:06] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Caroline: That's a great question.
[00:04:07] Jason: It's a fantastic question. We pretty much perpetually exist in this space.
[00:04:11] Caroline: This is the space that we live in.
[00:04:12] Jason: And I think this is, for those of you who are solo preneurs, like, it's just, you working on your business, I think that there is something to you kind of run at a capacity of ideas, right? Like...
[00:04:23] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Jason: It's like your brain also only has so much time to formulate new ideas because you're doing all the things, you're carrying all the plates, you're juggling all the balls, you're answering all this stuff and whatever. And so you could only come up with maybe so many ideas. Now, there maybe are some people like Leah, who like their idea machines. They're just always coming out ideas. Our problem, we're both idea machines.
[00:04:42] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:04:42] Jason: So there has never been a day in our lives that we've been working together where we have not gone, hey, I have an idea.
[00:04:47] Caroline: Never a day.
[00:04:48] Jason: Like, that phrase would be, like, just well worn into the grooves of our lives.
[00:04:52] Caroline: And it could be like a big idea. It could be a new product idea. It could be a small idea, like, hey, a tactic we haven't tried.
[00:04:58] Jason: Make the logo bigger. You know?
[00:05:00] Caroline: It's never make the logo bigger. You know, but just we always, and this is actually what we love about business, is that it is an infinite puzzle because, and there are a million different pieces. It's the thing that makes it overwhelming, but it's also the thing that makes it fun, because every new day comes with a new idea that you can execute on. And also, I mean, maybe this is just the optimist in me, but there's always a way to make it better. You know what I mean? When it comes to your business, there's always an idea to try. There's always an experiment to run.
[00:05:26] Jason: Technology is changing, so there's something new to kind of, you know, inflect, especially as we talked about in last week's episode, with the tools that we're really liking that are helping us.
[00:05:34] Caroline: But the downside is you can get into this phase in your business where there's so many things that you really want to try. There's so many things you want to work on. And it can feel really frustrating that you're just one person and you only have a certain amount of time. And it can also feel really hard to prioritize those ideas to know which one to work on and which one is not going to distract you from the things you're already doing.
[00:05:59] Jason: Exactly. So we're going to go through four steps to hopefully help answer this question for Leah. But also, these are the steps that we take pretty much in our lives all the time. But I'd like you, if you don't mind, Caroline, to actually hit him with this quote first, and then we'll say it again at the end because I really like this quote. I don't, we don't know who it's attributed to, but it's the quote at the bottom that you added because I like it as a starting point. And then we'll...
[00:06:22] Caroline: I think it's attributed to Oprah, but what isn't? You know what I mean?
[00:06:26] Jason: Yeah, of course.
[00:06:26] Caroline: So who knows if it's actually attributed? But the quote that is at the bottom of our notes, which you just, you just were like, hit him with this quote. I was like, what quote?
[00:06:35] Jason: Well, there's only one quote in here.
[00:06:36] Caroline: Okay. But actually, I wrote the notes, so they're all quotes.
[00:06:39] Jason: Okay, great. All right.
[00:06:41] Caroline: The whole notes is a quote, and it's just for me.
[00:06:43] Jason: All right, now let's hit him with the quote. You got this.
[00:06:45] Caroline: The quote that it reminded me of is, "You can do it all, just not at the same time."
[00:06:50] Jason: Yes.
[00:06:51] Caroline: And I, again, don't know if that is correctly attributed to Oprah, but I think about it often because I am this person, as Jason mentioned, we live in this space, and I always think to myself, like, oh, I want to do everything. I want to do it all. I want to do all my ideas. And I always remind myself, totally, absolutely, Caroline. You can. It's just that you can't do all those things at the same time. And so if you come up with a system for ordering them and prioritizing them and following through on them, this is another big theme of this podcast, is like, once you clarify, you're able to follow through on things and you're able to get momentum, and then you can go on to the next project. But what a lot of people do is they try to service 20 of their ideas at one time, and it actually creates a lack of momentum and it keeps them stuck.
[00:07:34] Jason: Yeah. All right, let's start with step one. So the first step in getting all these ideas out somewhere and in some shape or form to be able to work on them is what we call writing a Big Ass List.
[00:07:46] Caroline: Yeah, it's, this is our...
[00:07:48] Jason: Very technical.
[00:07:48] Caroline: Copyright Big Ass List.
[00:07:49] Jason: Yeah. This can be done whatever way works best for you. But the most important part, and we're, we have seen this in ourselves, but we've also seen this in our Wandering Aimfully members a lot is, when you're feeling overwhelmed, a lot of times it's because things are just clogged up in your brain and you haven't actually put them anywhere. So it's not even about assigning to do anything with them, it's just about getting them out and onto paper or wherever works best for you.
[00:08:11] Caroline: Yeah. Like, I'm no neuroscientist, but my understanding of the human brain is, like, if things are kind of taking up space in your, like, short term memory stores, it's going to clog up your ability to process those things to understand whether it's a good idea, because it's just you're using brain power to kind of, like, keep them all in your head. You're in the shower and you're, like, thinking about ideas. You're on a walk and you're thinking about ideas, but you never took the time to sit down and write those down. So step one is like getting a place to put all those things. And you can do this in any type of way. You can. If you're someone who thinks in a linear form, you can write it all down in a bulleted list. That goes for on paper or digital, whatever you feel more comfortable with. You can, if you're a more visual person... I love using, like, a mind map where it's like, this is my idea, and then these are the three thoughts that come off of that idea, and this is how it connects to this idea. And so just kind of like doing more of a mind map format. Recently, this was a new thing. We had a bunch of ideas of things we wanted to work on with Teachery. And I said, when we get home, I'm writing them all in index cards, and I'm putting them on our dining room table so we can see them all. And that's how we, like, categorize them. So you could write each idea down on an index card so you can see it as, like, a tangible thing outside your brain.
[00:09:19] Jason: I think one other note to add here before we kind of, you know, move past the Big Ass List, because the Big Ass List is a very simple thing to do. But also, one thing that I think gets lost in this is you don't just write one Big Ass List for, like, six months. We sometimes will write Big Ass Lists every day while we're in a busy season because the ideas keep coming, or we need to reprioritize the idea.
[00:09:40] Caroline: Refine and refine.
[00:09:41] Jason: And so it's like, I think you need to give yourself permission. If you are feeling like all the time you have all these ideas, just keep writing them all down. If it's every single day. Like, I used to do this. You remember the Teux Deux app?
[00:09:51] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Jason: This is ten years ago. Still exists, but I remember using this at the very beginning and I found it so helpful to write down. Every morning I would just sit down. It was my first task of the day. I'm just like, what are the ideas that are in my brain? And then I would take them there and go, okay, but, like, what three do I want to get done? And then I came up with this silly system that was the three by 333 system. I don't remember that, but it was like, if I work for 333 days in a year, taking like, weekends off, but not all of them, I would get a thousand things done in a year. So I would just do three things every day. It was very convoluted. I don't know why I didn't catch on. Probably because it's kind of confusing. But no matter what, I just really helped to, like, every day write that list down, then carve out the things I want to do. But I just bring that up because I think people listening to this might think, okay, I write down a Big Ass List and, like, that's going to get all the ideas out of my head. It might be something you have to do consistently over and over again, or just come back to every single week or month.
[00:10:38] Caroline: And I think it's cool because, again, it's a little bit different than like a task list, right? Like, because these are, like, projects in my, in my mind, these are big ideas, these are big projects. But I think to your point, when you write them repeatedly, even if it's not on a daily basis, also, you're gonna find that certain things kind of naturally fall off the list, and certain things are always on there. And that in itself is a natural way to show you what is important to you and what is top of mind. But after you do that, so you're gonna, I also wanna just warn you, you're gonna probably be overwhelmed by this because remember, these things have been living in your head, and if you're feeling overwhelmed with them in your head, you're gonna feel overwhelmed once you actually look at them. But I think this is actually a good thing because it's a reminder of, like, man, that chaos was just floating around in my brain, and now it's like, actually in a place where I can do something with it. But now, once you have everything kind of out on the table, how do you decide what to do? That's what this whole podcast is about. And the thing is, I wish I could tell you, like, do this idea first or do this type of thing first. And the uncomfortable truth is that everyone's business is different. Every person is different. There's no one size fits all. This is why a lot of our business advice ends up being frustrating, because you have to put it through the lens of your own experience. But it's also what makes it, I think, more nuanced and more truthful, because a lot of business coaches out there will just tell you, like, definitely do this thing. And I'm like, every person is different. So tell me how you know that that person should definitely do that thing.
[00:12:02] Jason: Exactly.
[00:12:02] Caroline: But so as we go through these next steps, I want you to think about for your own situation, for your own ideas, for your own business. How can you create a criteria that is unique to you? So let's move on to step number two with that caveat out of the way. And that is how we approach it, is to sort all of these ideas into buckets, right? Because let's say you have 20 things on the table. How do you make sense of 20 things? My brain is always like, start from the most chaos and just start organizing things until you get to a place of being able to prioritize. So one thing that we absolutely love to do, for example, with Teachery, is organize those projects into buckets by Marketing Bridge stage. So, Marketing Bridge is an idea that we talk about often on this podcast. It's the idea of just your customer's journey. Like, how are you getting someone from becoming a stranger to a buyer to a customer? And so for us, when we had all those Teachery projects written down, these are the things we want to get done on the dining room table. We basically put them into four buckets. Finding new leads, projects... projects that were for finding new leads, projects that were for nurturing leads, projects that were for acquiring free trials and then projects that were for selling and retention. And those four stages actually follow our Marketing Bridge framework. Find, nurture, acquire slash propose, and then sell.
[00:13:18] Jason: Yeah. And that might look differently for your business, right? So that that is specific to our software platform, Teachery, and kind of what the four stages are. But for you, it might be, you know, finding new leads, which is the same thing. Nurturing leads, which is the same thing. But then acquiring free trials might be getting someone to purchase maybe your lower priced product. It might be getting someone to sign up for a 30 day challenge that you do, leading into a product, like, whatever that thing is. It's kind of like getting someone ready to buy and then getting them to the selling stage and then retaining them as a customer moving forward.
[00:13:47] Caroline: Yep. So the marketing stage buckets, that's one way you could do it is those could be your four categories. But this is where the kind of uniqueness comes in, is you get to choose whatever you want the buckets to be. It doesn't have to be by Marketing Bridge. You could have your projects and you could categorize them into two buckets. Like, these are my money making projects and then these are my passion projects. So like, one of these I do for, you know, sales and one of these I do for just because I love it. Or maybe you're a business owner who has client based projects, but then you have digital product projects. So you're trying to build up the scalable part of your business. And then maybe you have like admin projects that are just like running the business in general. And that's the way you could categorize it. So the whole thing is like, these categories should really relate to whatever the overall goal is that you have. So for us, our goal is to grow Teachery's customer base this year. So it makes sense that our buckets are kind of related to the customer journey because we're trying to get them across that customer journey. And the idea is like, if we tackle different buckets, that's going to help us achieve that overall goal. But for you, like, maybe you're feeling uninspired in your business, and so maybe your goal is to reignite your passion with hobbies while still maintaining your business so that you feel like, more alive and like that's your personal goal. So maybe it makes sense to do the whole money making projects versus passion projects. Cause that's how you're gonna choose what to work on. Does that make sense?
[00:15:04] Jason: Yeah.
[00:15:05] Caroline: Cool. So once you have your buckets.
[00:15:08] Jason: Got buckets.
[00:15:09] Caroline: You got buckets.
[00:15:10] Jason: You got a Big Ass List. You're ready to go fishing.
[00:15:12] Caroline: You're ready to go fishing.
[00:15:13] Jason: Yeah.
[00:15:14] Caroline: So obviously you got your Big Ass List. So now you're gonna basically assign each of those projects into a bucket. You're gonna categorize them. And step three, now that we have that done, now we need to prioritize. Okay. And prioritizing is going to be a lot easier once you see these ideas into categories. So what I think is you're looking at these categories and you're going, the real question you're asking yourself is how many of these projects can I actually handle in order to achieve my goal, right? Like, that's the problem is like, maybe we have 20 ideas and maybe we can only do one or two at a time. That's what we're really asking ourselves. So I find it very helpful because everyone's capacity is different, because everyone's time horizon that they think in is different. I think it's really helpful to come up with, like, a clarifying statement, and that basically has, like, the number of projects that you want to choose, the time frame that you want to do them in, and then, like, the goal that you want to have. So as I go to prioritize my projects, I think to myself, what five projects...? That's the number. Can Jason and I complete by the end of May? That's our timeframe that we want to work in. In order to get 20 new Teachery customers? That's our goal. So what five projects by the end of May will get us 20 customers? And when you formulate that three part kind of question, now you have a lens through which to look at all your ideas and ask yourself, is this going to get me to my goal, right?
[00:16:38] Jason: Yeah. And we really come back to prioritization often. And I would say that happens on, like, a weekly basis. It happens on a monthly basis. It happens on a quarterly basis. And I think a big lesson that we have learned over the years that especially if you're maybe newer to business or even just working for yourself, is that it's really easy to set yearly goals and to like, okay, these are the things I want to get done this year. These are my big ideas for the year. But then as the year goes on and you realize, like, oh, I'm a quarter of the year. I've got none of these done. Then it almost feels like these goals are insurmountable. And so what we like to do is we really like to just reassess constantly. So, like, just total transparency, we did not hit our first quarter goals for Teachery customers. But instead of going, well, there goes our whole year's plan of revenue, it's like, no, now we reassess the next quarter and we readjust our goals and we leave our end goal the same towards the end of the year because we could possibly still hit that. We're still plenty early in the year, but what we don't do is basically just go, okay, well, now nothing's going to work because it didn't hit our goals in the first quarter.
[00:17:35] Caroline: What we don't do is work off of old projections that are just going to make us feel shittier and shittier every single month.
[00:17:40] Jason: Yeah.
[00:17:41] Caroline: So, so my whole, like, determining factor on that is, whenever your milestones stop becoming motivating and they start becoming discouraging, that's when it's time to reassess, because goals should exist in order to get you excited. They should motivate you, not make you feel, you know, bad about your inability to reach them. And so, yeah, that typically works for us on, like, a three month timeframe is like every quarter we look back on our milestones and go, okay, cool, we're not hitting those. That's okay. Let's... Let's reassess our projections for the year. So now they feel motivating again and let's just reset. So that's a good point to kind of... little tangent to bring up. So, again, coming back to this clarifying question, we're trying to prioritize, right? So, for Teachery, if it was, what five projects can we complete by the end of May to get 20 new customers? For you, maybe it's what one project in the next month will help me reignite my passion for my business? Like, whatever that statement is, you get to decide the parts. That becomes your clarifying question. And so now you're going to choose that number of projects. So if you just want to go one at a time and you want to go, what one project am I going to work on for the next month? You're going to choose one. For us, you know, we're two people. We can tend to juggle five things at a time. That's fine for us. And so what we're doing is now we're looking bucket by bucket through all of our ideas. What is going to get us to that goal? What do we want to prioritize? That's the criteria. And we're kind of thinking with every project. Here are some considerations that were in the back of our minds as we look at each project. We're thinking about the input versus output, meaning how much time and energy am I going to have to put into this project in order to get what out of it? So you're kind of thinking that. You're asking yourself, what is going to be the timeframe for the payoff, quote, unquote? So, like, is this going to be kind of a planting seeds project where I know I'm not going to get a lot out of it for six months and that's okay, I'm okay with that? Or do I know that I need to see more momentum? So I want a project that's gonna have a quicker payoff timeframe, like, it's gonna show me some results in the next few weeks. You're thinking about that. You're also thinking about, are there certain projects that might actually detract from what you're already doing? So, for example, maybe one of your projects is like, launch a new product, but that product is to a whole new audience. And that's exciting to you and you like that, but you're like, that's going to make it harder for me to talk to my existing audience that I feel like is really dialed in. So you do want to be mindful of are some of these ideas detracting from something that's already working? And so what we did was just, we have our four categories. Again, I'm using Teachery as an example here. We have our 20 ideas. We're scanning across the four categories and we're asking ourselves, you know, what five projects can get us 20 customers by the end of May? And for us, it's helpful because we ordered the buckets basically. And we were like, okay, bucket number one is we want to work on things that are, you know, fixing, or we call it our castle, but like fixing the, the product first and fixing the end result first. Then stage two is going to be kind of like nurturing those people coming up with that. Then stage three is going to be finding new customers. And so we could kind of order our stages in that way. And then it became clear, like, okay, let's pick ideas from each of those categories.
[00:20:50] Jason: Yeah. And I think just to give two concrete examples there for what we're doing, because maybe it'll help spur some, some of your ideas into the right prioritization, the right bucket. So two things that are on our list. One is offering like a done for you course migration. If you're using another course software and you're coming over to Teachery, which I think probably at a bare minimum, 50% of people who come to Teachery and start a trial are coming with another course platform that they've been using before. So that means that those people, to get them to be a customer, that's a very attractive offer. Like, hey, I already have a course. Can you, if you move it over to Teachery, I am way more likely to stay with you. But the other thing that's on our list is creating a YouTube channel for Teachery and recording videos and putting content out. Now that time to getting someone from watching the video, signing up for a trial, getting a course going. Like any of those, that is so much longer. So the, the input for that is a much longer term potential reward, you know, as far as the output that we would get out of it. So you know, for us, it's about looking at those two things going, okay, if we want those 20 customers between now and the end of May, it's actually probably more important to do the done for you course migration. So what do we need to do right now to prioritize that? Because that actually might move the needle faster than getting on YouTube and having 27 people watch our first videos 'cause that's how all YouTube channels start.
[00:22:03] Caroline: Exactly. And it's... And it's really difficult, right? Because I could see another argument where you go, well, if the YouTube thing is gonna take longer to pay off, you should do that sooner, right? Because the sooner you get started on that, the sooner you'll see those results. And that's totally a way that you can think about it. But this goes back to what I was saying about what is it that you need right now? And for us, we need some momentum, we need some movement in customers in order to feel like we're getting some results. And so if you know that you really want to see some quicker results right now, that has to go into your consideration. So this is what I mean about, like, it really is all about what you want, what you're trying to accomplish right now, whether business related or just, you know, life related. And you have to come up with your own criteria for prioritizing things and your own logic that makes sense to you.
[00:22:50] Jason: Yeah, exactly. Okay.
[00:22:52] Caroline: Okay. So. Oh, I also just wanna say, I know this is a silly thing to pull out, but I wanted to kind of underscore it. Ordering things, putting things in order is, I swear, a life hack that not enough people use.
[00:23:05] Jason: I think also it comes more naturally to some people than others.
[00:23:08] Caroline: I do agree with that, but that's what I mean. This changed my life when I realized, and it's gonna sound so simple, that I could... when I first started working for myself, I was very overwhelmed with, what do I work on every day? This is even before Notion, before I had a task list, I would just kind of sit down to my computer and write down in a piece of paper, like, what do I want to do today? Kind of like what you were saying with your, like to do things.
[00:23:32] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:32] Caroline: But the moment that I realized that I could write a Big Ass List and then I could put numbers by things. I'm going to do this first. I'm going to do this second. I'm going to do this third. I'm going to do this fourth. I'm telling you, it, like, changed my life.
[00:23:43] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:43] Caroline: Because I needed... I needed, like, myself to tell myself what order to do these things in.
[00:23:49] Jason: Yeah, this... We missed a metaphor on this entire episode, which is cooking.
[00:23:54] Caroline: Okay.
[00:23:55] Jason: And so what I'm thinking about right now, the metaphor for this ordering things in life, is when you're cooking. So what have you learned about cooking that, like, makes your job so much easier for you to cook in the kitchen?
[00:24:09] Caroline: That I need to know what order to put things in, to do things in.
[00:24:13] Jason: Right. But then also, like, what first step helps you to, like, have the best experience cooking possible?
[00:24:20] Caroline: I don't know.
[00:24:21] Jason: Mise en place.
[00:24:22] Caroline: Aha. Uh huh. Like, prepare everything.
[00:24:24] Jason: Exactly. So if you just go in the kitchen, and I'm like, hey, babe, will you cook some chicken, some zucchini, and some mushrooms, and just put it all together? I think what you used to do is you'd be like, okay, I'm gonna start cooking the chicken. So I'll cut up the chicken. I'll throw it in the skillet. I'm gonna start cutting up the zucchini and whatever, but it's like, okay, if I actually cut up the chicken, cut up the zucchini, cut up the mushrooms, cut up the garlic, put them in all their little bowls, and then I start to, like, assemble and get it going. You become much more efficient at getting things done, and you go from, like, a kind of a scatterbrained mess of, like, working in the kitchen. This is everybody, not just Caroline, but I think this is the same thing with ideas. It's like, if you're just kind of, like, leaving your ideas out there and just being like, well, I'll just grab it one, and then I'll start working on another one or whatever. It's like, no, I'm gonna set all my ideas out. I'm gonna put them in their little buckets or little bowls and their little ingredients, and then I'm gonna just, like, attack one that's most important to, like, get this meal cooked all the way through and, like, have it be delicious and have it be cohesive by the end. It's not just, well, let's just cook some garlic right now and just see what happens for the next ten minutes.
[00:25:19] Caroline: And it's all those little, like, in between steps, too, where it's like, okay, well, I gotta get the, you know, I gotta do the oil on the kale to get it resting before I can add it to the recipe.
[00:25:29] Jason: Exactly.
[00:25:30] Caroline: Three freaking steps later. That's why I hate it.
[00:25:31] Jason: And you only know that...
[00:25:33] Caroline: I'm like, tell me that in the recipe.
[00:25:34] Jason: But you only know that when you write out the big list.
[00:25:35] Caroline: Yep.
[00:25:36] Jason: Then you prioritize things in their buckets. So it's very much like, get all your ingredients, mise en plus, get them all ready. Get everything, like, set up and scheduled to like, when am I gonna cook everything? Then you're good to go. Which leads us perfectly into?
[00:25:46] Caroline: Right. Scheduling. So that was the last step that we just mentioned of prioritization. That's gonna be the hardest step because that's where you're choosing. And again, I wish I could give you the thing that's gonna make you be able to choose which to work on. The real takeaway here is you have to create your own criteria for prioritizing those things based on what your goals are. But once you do that, let's say you have your clarifying statement, you're picking one project, let's say. Okay, we have the one project, and you know that after that is going to be the next project. And so you're kind of ordering them, right? Now, you go, okay, cool, I can put it on my calendar. So the last step here is scheduling those projects and also assigning a timeframe. And if there's one lesson that we come back to over and over again, it's to double the timeframe that we think a project is going to take.
[00:26:33] Jason: Sadly, it's a very sad thing we have to do.
[00:26:35] Caroline: A sad thing we have to do. And we, you know, it bums us out every time. But it's the truth. Like, everything always takes double what you think it's going to take. And so this is one important key of not burning out is, you know, saying, I thought this was going to take a week. It's actually going to take me two weeks. So you want to assign a timeframe for that project, and then you want to break it down into what are the actual tasks involved here. We have an entire other process for that that we're not going to walk you through, but you really want to break it down into small chunks, and then you want to put those chunks on your calendar because, you know, you go from saying, I will do this project someday to, I will do this project Thursday, right? And that makes it more likely to get done.
[00:27:13] Jason: And we've talked about this before, but, like, I really firmly believe that, like, Google Calendar is kind of my boss. So it's like I, I give tasks to my future self by putting them on the calendar. And then as my day comes up, it's like my boss, which is previous me, goes, okay, here's what we're working on today. These are the things we scheduled. Like, you can't just put something else on the calendar now. I mean, you could, but like, these are things we agreed upon that we want to get done because we want to hit our goals. And like, I think there's this a big opportunity for, if you're the type of person listening to this where you have lots of ideas, you feel like you're constantly working and doing things, but like, you're not actually getting your ideas done. You're just like constantly stuck in like the, the little doer admin tasks that never feel like things are moving forward. It might be because you're never actually carving out the time for your ideas for future you to be able to work on. So you're just saying, like, okay, I am going to work on this new product next week, but you don't actually carve out the time. So next week comes and like a client reaches out or you're working a full time job and you get home and you're tired and you don't want to work on that thing and like, it's not actually staring you in the face going, hey, previous us agreed on this. Like, now's the time to work on it.
[00:28:12] Caroline: Definitely. So that's the final step. And I wish I could tell you that I could... Leah, tell you exactly which of your projects to work on right now.
[00:28:20] Jason: Metaphorical Leah. Not just Leah. Leah, who asked the question.
[00:28:23] Caroline: But I think it part of being a business owner comes down to, like, I hope this gives you kind of a structure for how to make those decisions. But I think part of being a business owner comes down to, you know your business best, you know yourself best, and what you need in the short term right now. And so by creating a criteria for evaluating your projects, you can start to prioritize them and order them and then schedule them so they actually get done. And then the hard part is obviously all the projects that don't get chosen.
[00:28:54] Jason: Yeah.
[00:28:54] Caroline: That's hard.
[00:28:55] Jason: And again, like, I brought this, I had you say this quote earlier because I think this quote is very, very helpful, which is hopefully by Oprah. "You can do it all, just not all at the same time." We're with you. Like we, we have ideas and especially a lot of them we think are good ideas and you want to do all those things. But we have learned that when you're trying to work on all the to do's that are in all the buckets and you're trying to prioritize and you're trying to schedule everything, it just leads out... It leads to burnout, it leads to being stressed, it leads to being, you know, feeling like you're never getting anything done because you're trying to do too many things at once.
[00:29:27] Caroline: Totally. Like, it just comes down to, you have to be realistic about your capacity, and you have to be realistic about your ability to focus. So I've learned over and over and over again that when I try to split focus, like, when I try to parse my attention between ten different projects, it's like filling up a bucket. You know, ten buckets, one drop at a time. And not only is that difficult because you lose productivity switching from one thing to the next, but it also makes everything harder because you get discouraged. You're like, I don't even see this bucket filling up. And I have learned that by focusing, I can actually see that momentum faster, and then I can follow through on a project. I can see the actual results of that project, which then fuels me into the next project. And so a lot of it for me is about... is about momentum and it's about motivation. And so that's where my discipline for being focused comes from. And I'm not saying I do it well 100% of the time. As an idea person, it's actually tremendously difficult. But I just, it's a mindfulness thing. Like, every day, I'm like, okay, if I just give myself one big thing today, if I can just focus. Like, I have a screensaver on my computer that says, focus brings ease. And every time I load up my computer, that's what I'm reminded of. Focus brings ease, because every time I have the ability to follow through on one thing, it makes everything easier. It makes me more motivated. It makes me feel like I can do what I want to do.
[00:30:48] Jason: Yeah. Cool. All right, anything else?
[00:30:51] Caroline: That's it. Hope it was helpful. And we're going to continue to have a million different ideas. And this is something that we're going to practice on a regular basis, but hope it gave you some ideas about how to handle that in your own business.
[00:31:01] Jason: Awesome. Great stuff. Hope you enjoyed it, Leah and metaphorical Leah. And we will be back in your ears next week with another episode.
[00:31:08] Caroline: Thanks for listening.
[00:31:09] Jason: Bye.
[00:31:09] Caroline: Bye.
[00:00:29] Jason: All right, cinnamon rollers. That's you. Let's get into the show.
[00:00:38] Caroline: Welcome, welcome, welcome to the podcast.
[00:00:40] Jason: Ooh, a triple welcome.
[00:00:40] Caroline: Once in my life, I have started the podcast.
[00:00:43] Jason: That's pretty great.
[00:00:43] Caroline: In my own voice.
[00:00:44] Jason: And you didn't even have to use our catchphrase. You just went straight into a triple welcome, which...
[00:00:48] Caroline: I always forget our catchphrase. I made it up. It's so stupid and I forget it.
[00:00:52] Jason: Yeah, it's okay. We don't need to rehash. We've talked about the catchphrase before. I do want to give an immediate first update for everybody who has been curious.
[00:01:00] Caroline: Yes.
[00:01:00] Jason: There have been a lot of comments in my DM's, a lot of emails coming through. I've been paged so many times about this. I have purchased a stand mixer. Yes, I will be taking my baking to the next level. I have been hand kneading Japanese milk bread rolls, cinnamon roll recipes. You don't really need a stand mixer to make cookies. Those are just you just mix it with together. But I am waiting for it to come in the mail. But I also ordered a Swedish one, which is made for bread because the standard KitchenAid, as you know, and all the listeners know, like, it's like the default stand mixer that people have. For me, I was just like, no, I'm not gonna be like everybody else.
[00:01:43] Caroline: Of course, this is very indicative of your personality.
[00:01:46] Jason: I went down the rabbit hole of, like, which stand mixer is best for bread. And many older women on YouTube told me that it's this one.
[00:01:54] Caroline: That's your authority source.
[00:01:55] Jason: Ankarsrum.
[00:01:56] Caroline: If there was a baking authority...
[00:01:58] Jason: Yes.
[00:01:58] Caroline: It's, like, Nana making cookies.
[00:01:59] Jason: It is for sure.
[00:02:00] Caroline: If you go to Nana and you say, what standing mixer should I get?
[00:02:03] Jason: I happily told my mom that I'm finally buying a stand mixer. I've never owned one. And she said, great. If the business stuff doesn't work out, you can always fall back on being a baker. And I wrote back and I said, that's not true because I would eat all the profits. So unfortunately, don't think that's actually the case.
[00:02:17] Caroline: Yeah, actually that's my new business motivation is we got to get this whole thing, like, really sustainable and working for the long run because I can't have you...
[00:02:25] Jason: Just eating gluten constantly.
[00:02:27] Caroline: Going to try and be a baker because we're not going to make it. Missed opportunity for that company not to make a standing mixer brand called Sweet-ish.
[00:02:36] Jason: Right. Because they're Swedish.
[00:02:37] Caroline: Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, okay.
[00:02:41] Jason: Let's go ahead and move into the episode. I think now that everyone's gotten that update. Once I have it in my possession, I will... I'll share with everybody my first ever using a stand mixer.
[00:02:49] Caroline: What's the first thing you're gonna make?
[00:02:50] Jason: Cinnamon rolls.
[00:02:51] Caroline: Okay.
[00:02:52] Jason: You got to. You gotta christen the stand mixer with the thing that it was made for. Then it'll make bread.
[00:02:57] Caroline: Cue Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made For?".
[00:02:58] Jason: What's really ironic about this is that I make sourdough bread every single week of my life.
[00:03:02] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:03:03] Jason: But it's like a no knead recipe. It's just you do some stretch and folds, which, you know.
[00:03:07] Caroline: No knead, there's so many puns in baking. My God.
[00:03:09] Jason: Yeah. This is why you should also become a baker. You can use my stand mixer.
[00:03:13] Caroline: How about I'm just a baking assistant and I just say all the puns?
[00:03:16] Jason: Okay, fantastic.
[00:03:16] Caroline: And I test the recipes.
[00:03:18] Jason: All right, you wanna give a shout out to Leah for submitting this topic idea to our podcast?
[00:03:22] Caroline: Yes, of course I do. Thank you to Leah for submitting this idea to our podcast.
[00:03:27] Jason: Great job. Wow.
[00:03:28] Caroline: Well, as the words came out, I was like, well, that's exactly what Jason just said. But we...
[00:03:32] Jason: Hold on. Try it again. Let's just. Yeah, well, like it never happened. Try it your own way.
[00:03:36] Caroline: Okay.
[00:03:37] Jason: Yeah.
[00:03:37] Caroline: Big shout out to Leah for submitting this question. We both saw it and thought, this is a great idea for a podcast. That felt different.
[00:03:44] Jason: That was pretty good. All right, great. Yeah. Okay, wonderful.
[00:03:48] Caroline: Leah's question is, I'd love your thoughts on what to do when you have too many self proclaimed good ideas for improving your business. You're really excited about all of them, but you know that doing all of them at once would probably make you do all of them a little bit shitty.
[00:04:01] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:02] Caroline: And you can't decide which one to prioritize and which one to set aside slash let go.
[00:04:06] Jason: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Caroline: That's a great question.
[00:04:07] Jason: It's a fantastic question. We pretty much perpetually exist in this space.
[00:04:11] Caroline: This is the space that we live in.
[00:04:12] Jason: And I think this is, for those of you who are solo preneurs, like, it's just, you working on your business, I think that there is something to you kind of run at a capacity of ideas, right? Like...
[00:04:23] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:04:23] Jason: It's like your brain also only has so much time to formulate new ideas because you're doing all the things, you're carrying all the plates, you're juggling all the balls, you're answering all this stuff and whatever. And so you could only come up with maybe so many ideas. Now, there maybe are some people like Leah, who like their idea machines. They're just always coming out ideas. Our problem, we're both idea machines.
[00:04:42] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:04:42] Jason: So there has never been a day in our lives that we've been working together where we have not gone, hey, I have an idea.
[00:04:47] Caroline: Never a day.
[00:04:48] Jason: Like, that phrase would be, like, just well worn into the grooves of our lives.
[00:04:52] Caroline: And it could be like a big idea. It could be a new product idea. It could be a small idea, like, hey, a tactic we haven't tried.
[00:04:58] Jason: Make the logo bigger. You know?
[00:05:00] Caroline: It's never make the logo bigger. You know, but just we always, and this is actually what we love about business, is that it is an infinite puzzle because, and there are a million different pieces. It's the thing that makes it overwhelming, but it's also the thing that makes it fun, because every new day comes with a new idea that you can execute on. And also, I mean, maybe this is just the optimist in me, but there's always a way to make it better. You know what I mean? When it comes to your business, there's always an idea to try. There's always an experiment to run.
[00:05:26] Jason: Technology is changing, so there's something new to kind of, you know, inflect, especially as we talked about in last week's episode, with the tools that we're really liking that are helping us.
[00:05:34] Caroline: But the downside is you can get into this phase in your business where there's so many things that you really want to try. There's so many things you want to work on. And it can feel really frustrating that you're just one person and you only have a certain amount of time. And it can also feel really hard to prioritize those ideas to know which one to work on and which one is not going to distract you from the things you're already doing.
[00:05:59] Jason: Exactly. So we're going to go through four steps to hopefully help answer this question for Leah. But also, these are the steps that we take pretty much in our lives all the time. But I'd like you, if you don't mind, Caroline, to actually hit him with this quote first, and then we'll say it again at the end because I really like this quote. I don't, we don't know who it's attributed to, but it's the quote at the bottom that you added because I like it as a starting point. And then we'll...
[00:06:22] Caroline: I think it's attributed to Oprah, but what isn't? You know what I mean?
[00:06:26] Jason: Yeah, of course.
[00:06:26] Caroline: So who knows if it's actually attributed? But the quote that is at the bottom of our notes, which you just, you just were like, hit him with this quote. I was like, what quote?
[00:06:35] Jason: Well, there's only one quote in here.
[00:06:36] Caroline: Okay. But actually, I wrote the notes, so they're all quotes.
[00:06:39] Jason: Okay, great. All right.
[00:06:41] Caroline: The whole notes is a quote, and it's just for me.
[00:06:43] Jason: All right, now let's hit him with the quote. You got this.
[00:06:45] Caroline: The quote that it reminded me of is, "You can do it all, just not at the same time."
[00:06:50] Jason: Yes.
[00:06:51] Caroline: And I, again, don't know if that is correctly attributed to Oprah, but I think about it often because I am this person, as Jason mentioned, we live in this space, and I always think to myself, like, oh, I want to do everything. I want to do it all. I want to do all my ideas. And I always remind myself, totally, absolutely, Caroline. You can. It's just that you can't do all those things at the same time. And so if you come up with a system for ordering them and prioritizing them and following through on them, this is another big theme of this podcast, is like, once you clarify, you're able to follow through on things and you're able to get momentum, and then you can go on to the next project. But what a lot of people do is they try to service 20 of their ideas at one time, and it actually creates a lack of momentum and it keeps them stuck.
[00:07:34] Jason: Yeah. All right, let's start with step one. So the first step in getting all these ideas out somewhere and in some shape or form to be able to work on them is what we call writing a Big Ass List.
[00:07:46] Caroline: Yeah, it's, this is our...
[00:07:48] Jason: Very technical.
[00:07:48] Caroline: Copyright Big Ass List.
[00:07:49] Jason: Yeah. This can be done whatever way works best for you. But the most important part, and we're, we have seen this in ourselves, but we've also seen this in our Wandering Aimfully members a lot is, when you're feeling overwhelmed, a lot of times it's because things are just clogged up in your brain and you haven't actually put them anywhere. So it's not even about assigning to do anything with them, it's just about getting them out and onto paper or wherever works best for you.
[00:08:11] Caroline: Yeah. Like, I'm no neuroscientist, but my understanding of the human brain is, like, if things are kind of taking up space in your, like, short term memory stores, it's going to clog up your ability to process those things to understand whether it's a good idea, because it's just you're using brain power to kind of, like, keep them all in your head. You're in the shower and you're, like, thinking about ideas. You're on a walk and you're thinking about ideas, but you never took the time to sit down and write those down. So step one is like getting a place to put all those things. And you can do this in any type of way. You can. If you're someone who thinks in a linear form, you can write it all down in a bulleted list. That goes for on paper or digital, whatever you feel more comfortable with. You can, if you're a more visual person... I love using, like, a mind map where it's like, this is my idea, and then these are the three thoughts that come off of that idea, and this is how it connects to this idea. And so just kind of like doing more of a mind map format. Recently, this was a new thing. We had a bunch of ideas of things we wanted to work on with Teachery. And I said, when we get home, I'm writing them all in index cards, and I'm putting them on our dining room table so we can see them all. And that's how we, like, categorize them. So you could write each idea down on an index card so you can see it as, like, a tangible thing outside your brain.
[00:09:19] Jason: I think one other note to add here before we kind of, you know, move past the Big Ass List, because the Big Ass List is a very simple thing to do. But also, one thing that I think gets lost in this is you don't just write one Big Ass List for, like, six months. We sometimes will write Big Ass Lists every day while we're in a busy season because the ideas keep coming, or we need to reprioritize the idea.
[00:09:40] Caroline: Refine and refine.
[00:09:41] Jason: And so it's like, I think you need to give yourself permission. If you are feeling like all the time you have all these ideas, just keep writing them all down. If it's every single day. Like, I used to do this. You remember the Teux Deux app?
[00:09:51] Caroline: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Jason: This is ten years ago. Still exists, but I remember using this at the very beginning and I found it so helpful to write down. Every morning I would just sit down. It was my first task of the day. I'm just like, what are the ideas that are in my brain? And then I would take them there and go, okay, but, like, what three do I want to get done? And then I came up with this silly system that was the three by 333 system. I don't remember that, but it was like, if I work for 333 days in a year, taking like, weekends off, but not all of them, I would get a thousand things done in a year. So I would just do three things every day. It was very convoluted. I don't know why I didn't catch on. Probably because it's kind of confusing. But no matter what, I just really helped to, like, every day write that list down, then carve out the things I want to do. But I just bring that up because I think people listening to this might think, okay, I write down a Big Ass List and, like, that's going to get all the ideas out of my head. It might be something you have to do consistently over and over again, or just come back to every single week or month.
[00:10:38] Caroline: And I think it's cool because, again, it's a little bit different than like a task list, right? Like, because these are, like, projects in my, in my mind, these are big ideas, these are big projects. But I think to your point, when you write them repeatedly, even if it's not on a daily basis, also, you're gonna find that certain things kind of naturally fall off the list, and certain things are always on there. And that in itself is a natural way to show you what is important to you and what is top of mind. But after you do that, so you're gonna, I also wanna just warn you, you're gonna probably be overwhelmed by this because remember, these things have been living in your head, and if you're feeling overwhelmed with them in your head, you're gonna feel overwhelmed once you actually look at them. But I think this is actually a good thing because it's a reminder of, like, man, that chaos was just floating around in my brain, and now it's like, actually in a place where I can do something with it. But now, once you have everything kind of out on the table, how do you decide what to do? That's what this whole podcast is about. And the thing is, I wish I could tell you, like, do this idea first or do this type of thing first. And the uncomfortable truth is that everyone's business is different. Every person is different. There's no one size fits all. This is why a lot of our business advice ends up being frustrating, because you have to put it through the lens of your own experience. But it's also what makes it, I think, more nuanced and more truthful, because a lot of business coaches out there will just tell you, like, definitely do this thing. And I'm like, every person is different. So tell me how you know that that person should definitely do that thing.
[00:12:02] Jason: Exactly.
[00:12:02] Caroline: But so as we go through these next steps, I want you to think about for your own situation, for your own ideas, for your own business. How can you create a criteria that is unique to you? So let's move on to step number two with that caveat out of the way. And that is how we approach it, is to sort all of these ideas into buckets, right? Because let's say you have 20 things on the table. How do you make sense of 20 things? My brain is always like, start from the most chaos and just start organizing things until you get to a place of being able to prioritize. So one thing that we absolutely love to do, for example, with Teachery, is organize those projects into buckets by Marketing Bridge stage. So, Marketing Bridge is an idea that we talk about often on this podcast. It's the idea of just your customer's journey. Like, how are you getting someone from becoming a stranger to a buyer to a customer? And so for us, when we had all those Teachery projects written down, these are the things we want to get done on the dining room table. We basically put them into four buckets. Finding new leads, projects... projects that were for finding new leads, projects that were for nurturing leads, projects that were for acquiring free trials and then projects that were for selling and retention. And those four stages actually follow our Marketing Bridge framework. Find, nurture, acquire slash propose, and then sell.
[00:13:18] Jason: Yeah. And that might look differently for your business, right? So that that is specific to our software platform, Teachery, and kind of what the four stages are. But for you, it might be, you know, finding new leads, which is the same thing. Nurturing leads, which is the same thing. But then acquiring free trials might be getting someone to purchase maybe your lower priced product. It might be getting someone to sign up for a 30 day challenge that you do, leading into a product, like, whatever that thing is. It's kind of like getting someone ready to buy and then getting them to the selling stage and then retaining them as a customer moving forward.
[00:13:47] Caroline: Yep. So the marketing stage buckets, that's one way you could do it is those could be your four categories. But this is where the kind of uniqueness comes in, is you get to choose whatever you want the buckets to be. It doesn't have to be by Marketing Bridge. You could have your projects and you could categorize them into two buckets. Like, these are my money making projects and then these are my passion projects. So like, one of these I do for, you know, sales and one of these I do for just because I love it. Or maybe you're a business owner who has client based projects, but then you have digital product projects. So you're trying to build up the scalable part of your business. And then maybe you have like admin projects that are just like running the business in general. And that's the way you could categorize it. So the whole thing is like, these categories should really relate to whatever the overall goal is that you have. So for us, our goal is to grow Teachery's customer base this year. So it makes sense that our buckets are kind of related to the customer journey because we're trying to get them across that customer journey. And the idea is like, if we tackle different buckets, that's going to help us achieve that overall goal. But for you, like, maybe you're feeling uninspired in your business, and so maybe your goal is to reignite your passion with hobbies while still maintaining your business so that you feel like, more alive and like that's your personal goal. So maybe it makes sense to do the whole money making projects versus passion projects. Cause that's how you're gonna choose what to work on. Does that make sense?
[00:15:04] Jason: Yeah.
[00:15:05] Caroline: Cool. So once you have your buckets.
[00:15:08] Jason: Got buckets.
[00:15:09] Caroline: You got buckets.
[00:15:10] Jason: You got a Big Ass List. You're ready to go fishing.
[00:15:12] Caroline: You're ready to go fishing.
[00:15:13] Jason: Yeah.
[00:15:14] Caroline: So obviously you got your Big Ass List. So now you're gonna basically assign each of those projects into a bucket. You're gonna categorize them. And step three, now that we have that done, now we need to prioritize. Okay. And prioritizing is going to be a lot easier once you see these ideas into categories. So what I think is you're looking at these categories and you're going, the real question you're asking yourself is how many of these projects can I actually handle in order to achieve my goal, right? Like, that's the problem is like, maybe we have 20 ideas and maybe we can only do one or two at a time. That's what we're really asking ourselves. So I find it very helpful because everyone's capacity is different, because everyone's time horizon that they think in is different. I think it's really helpful to come up with, like, a clarifying statement, and that basically has, like, the number of projects that you want to choose, the time frame that you want to do them in, and then, like, the goal that you want to have. So as I go to prioritize my projects, I think to myself, what five projects...? That's the number. Can Jason and I complete by the end of May? That's our timeframe that we want to work in. In order to get 20 new Teachery customers? That's our goal. So what five projects by the end of May will get us 20 customers? And when you formulate that three part kind of question, now you have a lens through which to look at all your ideas and ask yourself, is this going to get me to my goal, right?
[00:16:38] Jason: Yeah. And we really come back to prioritization often. And I would say that happens on, like, a weekly basis. It happens on a monthly basis. It happens on a quarterly basis. And I think a big lesson that we have learned over the years that especially if you're maybe newer to business or even just working for yourself, is that it's really easy to set yearly goals and to like, okay, these are the things I want to get done this year. These are my big ideas for the year. But then as the year goes on and you realize, like, oh, I'm a quarter of the year. I've got none of these done. Then it almost feels like these goals are insurmountable. And so what we like to do is we really like to just reassess constantly. So, like, just total transparency, we did not hit our first quarter goals for Teachery customers. But instead of going, well, there goes our whole year's plan of revenue, it's like, no, now we reassess the next quarter and we readjust our goals and we leave our end goal the same towards the end of the year because we could possibly still hit that. We're still plenty early in the year, but what we don't do is basically just go, okay, well, now nothing's going to work because it didn't hit our goals in the first quarter.
[00:17:35] Caroline: What we don't do is work off of old projections that are just going to make us feel shittier and shittier every single month.
[00:17:40] Jason: Yeah.
[00:17:41] Caroline: So, so my whole, like, determining factor on that is, whenever your milestones stop becoming motivating and they start becoming discouraging, that's when it's time to reassess, because goals should exist in order to get you excited. They should motivate you, not make you feel, you know, bad about your inability to reach them. And so, yeah, that typically works for us on, like, a three month timeframe is like every quarter we look back on our milestones and go, okay, cool, we're not hitting those. That's okay. Let's... Let's reassess our projections for the year. So now they feel motivating again and let's just reset. So that's a good point to kind of... little tangent to bring up. So, again, coming back to this clarifying question, we're trying to prioritize, right? So, for Teachery, if it was, what five projects can we complete by the end of May to get 20 new customers? For you, maybe it's what one project in the next month will help me reignite my passion for my business? Like, whatever that statement is, you get to decide the parts. That becomes your clarifying question. And so now you're going to choose that number of projects. So if you just want to go one at a time and you want to go, what one project am I going to work on for the next month? You're going to choose one. For us, you know, we're two people. We can tend to juggle five things at a time. That's fine for us. And so what we're doing is now we're looking bucket by bucket through all of our ideas. What is going to get us to that goal? What do we want to prioritize? That's the criteria. And we're kind of thinking with every project. Here are some considerations that were in the back of our minds as we look at each project. We're thinking about the input versus output, meaning how much time and energy am I going to have to put into this project in order to get what out of it? So you're kind of thinking that. You're asking yourself, what is going to be the timeframe for the payoff, quote, unquote? So, like, is this going to be kind of a planting seeds project where I know I'm not going to get a lot out of it for six months and that's okay, I'm okay with that? Or do I know that I need to see more momentum? So I want a project that's gonna have a quicker payoff timeframe, like, it's gonna show me some results in the next few weeks. You're thinking about that. You're also thinking about, are there certain projects that might actually detract from what you're already doing? So, for example, maybe one of your projects is like, launch a new product, but that product is to a whole new audience. And that's exciting to you and you like that, but you're like, that's going to make it harder for me to talk to my existing audience that I feel like is really dialed in. So you do want to be mindful of are some of these ideas detracting from something that's already working? And so what we did was just, we have our four categories. Again, I'm using Teachery as an example here. We have our 20 ideas. We're scanning across the four categories and we're asking ourselves, you know, what five projects can get us 20 customers by the end of May? And for us, it's helpful because we ordered the buckets basically. And we were like, okay, bucket number one is we want to work on things that are, you know, fixing, or we call it our castle, but like fixing the, the product first and fixing the end result first. Then stage two is going to be kind of like nurturing those people coming up with that. Then stage three is going to be finding new customers. And so we could kind of order our stages in that way. And then it became clear, like, okay, let's pick ideas from each of those categories.
[00:20:50] Jason: Yeah. And I think just to give two concrete examples there for what we're doing, because maybe it'll help spur some, some of your ideas into the right prioritization, the right bucket. So two things that are on our list. One is offering like a done for you course migration. If you're using another course software and you're coming over to Teachery, which I think probably at a bare minimum, 50% of people who come to Teachery and start a trial are coming with another course platform that they've been using before. So that means that those people, to get them to be a customer, that's a very attractive offer. Like, hey, I already have a course. Can you, if you move it over to Teachery, I am way more likely to stay with you. But the other thing that's on our list is creating a YouTube channel for Teachery and recording videos and putting content out. Now that time to getting someone from watching the video, signing up for a trial, getting a course going. Like any of those, that is so much longer. So the, the input for that is a much longer term potential reward, you know, as far as the output that we would get out of it. So you know, for us, it's about looking at those two things going, okay, if we want those 20 customers between now and the end of May, it's actually probably more important to do the done for you course migration. So what do we need to do right now to prioritize that? Because that actually might move the needle faster than getting on YouTube and having 27 people watch our first videos 'cause that's how all YouTube channels start.
[00:22:03] Caroline: Exactly. And it's... And it's really difficult, right? Because I could see another argument where you go, well, if the YouTube thing is gonna take longer to pay off, you should do that sooner, right? Because the sooner you get started on that, the sooner you'll see those results. And that's totally a way that you can think about it. But this goes back to what I was saying about what is it that you need right now? And for us, we need some momentum, we need some movement in customers in order to feel like we're getting some results. And so if you know that you really want to see some quicker results right now, that has to go into your consideration. So this is what I mean about, like, it really is all about what you want, what you're trying to accomplish right now, whether business related or just, you know, life related. And you have to come up with your own criteria for prioritizing things and your own logic that makes sense to you.
[00:22:50] Jason: Yeah, exactly. Okay.
[00:22:52] Caroline: Okay. So. Oh, I also just wanna say, I know this is a silly thing to pull out, but I wanted to kind of underscore it. Ordering things, putting things in order is, I swear, a life hack that not enough people use.
[00:23:05] Jason: I think also it comes more naturally to some people than others.
[00:23:08] Caroline: I do agree with that, but that's what I mean. This changed my life when I realized, and it's gonna sound so simple, that I could... when I first started working for myself, I was very overwhelmed with, what do I work on every day? This is even before Notion, before I had a task list, I would just kind of sit down to my computer and write down in a piece of paper, like, what do I want to do today? Kind of like what you were saying with your, like to do things.
[00:23:32] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:32] Caroline: But the moment that I realized that I could write a Big Ass List and then I could put numbers by things. I'm going to do this first. I'm going to do this second. I'm going to do this third. I'm going to do this fourth. I'm telling you, it, like, changed my life.
[00:23:43] Jason: Yeah.
[00:23:43] Caroline: Because I needed... I needed, like, myself to tell myself what order to do these things in.
[00:23:49] Jason: Yeah, this... We missed a metaphor on this entire episode, which is cooking.
[00:23:54] Caroline: Okay.
[00:23:55] Jason: And so what I'm thinking about right now, the metaphor for this ordering things in life, is when you're cooking. So what have you learned about cooking that, like, makes your job so much easier for you to cook in the kitchen?
[00:24:09] Caroline: That I need to know what order to put things in, to do things in.
[00:24:13] Jason: Right. But then also, like, what first step helps you to, like, have the best experience cooking possible?
[00:24:20] Caroline: I don't know.
[00:24:21] Jason: Mise en place.
[00:24:22] Caroline: Aha. Uh huh. Like, prepare everything.
[00:24:24] Jason: Exactly. So if you just go in the kitchen, and I'm like, hey, babe, will you cook some chicken, some zucchini, and some mushrooms, and just put it all together? I think what you used to do is you'd be like, okay, I'm gonna start cooking the chicken. So I'll cut up the chicken. I'll throw it in the skillet. I'm gonna start cutting up the zucchini and whatever, but it's like, okay, if I actually cut up the chicken, cut up the zucchini, cut up the mushrooms, cut up the garlic, put them in all their little bowls, and then I start to, like, assemble and get it going. You become much more efficient at getting things done, and you go from, like, a kind of a scatterbrained mess of, like, working in the kitchen. This is everybody, not just Caroline, but I think this is the same thing with ideas. It's like, if you're just kind of, like, leaving your ideas out there and just being like, well, I'll just grab it one, and then I'll start working on another one or whatever. It's like, no, I'm gonna set all my ideas out. I'm gonna put them in their little buckets or little bowls and their little ingredients, and then I'm gonna just, like, attack one that's most important to, like, get this meal cooked all the way through and, like, have it be delicious and have it be cohesive by the end. It's not just, well, let's just cook some garlic right now and just see what happens for the next ten minutes.
[00:25:19] Caroline: And it's all those little, like, in between steps, too, where it's like, okay, well, I gotta get the, you know, I gotta do the oil on the kale to get it resting before I can add it to the recipe.
[00:25:29] Jason: Exactly.
[00:25:30] Caroline: Three freaking steps later. That's why I hate it.
[00:25:31] Jason: And you only know that...
[00:25:33] Caroline: I'm like, tell me that in the recipe.
[00:25:34] Jason: But you only know that when you write out the big list.
[00:25:35] Caroline: Yep.
[00:25:36] Jason: Then you prioritize things in their buckets. So it's very much like, get all your ingredients, mise en plus, get them all ready. Get everything, like, set up and scheduled to like, when am I gonna cook everything? Then you're good to go. Which leads us perfectly into?
[00:25:46] Caroline: Right. Scheduling. So that was the last step that we just mentioned of prioritization. That's gonna be the hardest step because that's where you're choosing. And again, I wish I could give you the thing that's gonna make you be able to choose which to work on. The real takeaway here is you have to create your own criteria for prioritizing those things based on what your goals are. But once you do that, let's say you have your clarifying statement, you're picking one project, let's say. Okay, we have the one project, and you know that after that is going to be the next project. And so you're kind of ordering them, right? Now, you go, okay, cool, I can put it on my calendar. So the last step here is scheduling those projects and also assigning a timeframe. And if there's one lesson that we come back to over and over again, it's to double the timeframe that we think a project is going to take.
[00:26:33] Jason: Sadly, it's a very sad thing we have to do.
[00:26:35] Caroline: A sad thing we have to do. And we, you know, it bums us out every time. But it's the truth. Like, everything always takes double what you think it's going to take. And so this is one important key of not burning out is, you know, saying, I thought this was going to take a week. It's actually going to take me two weeks. So you want to assign a timeframe for that project, and then you want to break it down into what are the actual tasks involved here. We have an entire other process for that that we're not going to walk you through, but you really want to break it down into small chunks, and then you want to put those chunks on your calendar because, you know, you go from saying, I will do this project someday to, I will do this project Thursday, right? And that makes it more likely to get done.
[00:27:13] Jason: And we've talked about this before, but, like, I really firmly believe that, like, Google Calendar is kind of my boss. So it's like I, I give tasks to my future self by putting them on the calendar. And then as my day comes up, it's like my boss, which is previous me, goes, okay, here's what we're working on today. These are the things we scheduled. Like, you can't just put something else on the calendar now. I mean, you could, but like, these are things we agreed upon that we want to get done because we want to hit our goals. And like, I think there's this a big opportunity for, if you're the type of person listening to this where you have lots of ideas, you feel like you're constantly working and doing things, but like, you're not actually getting your ideas done. You're just like constantly stuck in like the, the little doer admin tasks that never feel like things are moving forward. It might be because you're never actually carving out the time for your ideas for future you to be able to work on. So you're just saying, like, okay, I am going to work on this new product next week, but you don't actually carve out the time. So next week comes and like a client reaches out or you're working a full time job and you get home and you're tired and you don't want to work on that thing and like, it's not actually staring you in the face going, hey, previous us agreed on this. Like, now's the time to work on it.
[00:28:12] Caroline: Definitely. So that's the final step. And I wish I could tell you that I could... Leah, tell you exactly which of your projects to work on right now.
[00:28:20] Jason: Metaphorical Leah. Not just Leah. Leah, who asked the question.
[00:28:23] Caroline: But I think it part of being a business owner comes down to, like, I hope this gives you kind of a structure for how to make those decisions. But I think part of being a business owner comes down to, you know your business best, you know yourself best, and what you need in the short term right now. And so by creating a criteria for evaluating your projects, you can start to prioritize them and order them and then schedule them so they actually get done. And then the hard part is obviously all the projects that don't get chosen.
[00:28:54] Jason: Yeah.
[00:28:54] Caroline: That's hard.
[00:28:55] Jason: And again, like, I brought this, I had you say this quote earlier because I think this quote is very, very helpful, which is hopefully by Oprah. "You can do it all, just not all at the same time." We're with you. Like we, we have ideas and especially a lot of them we think are good ideas and you want to do all those things. But we have learned that when you're trying to work on all the to do's that are in all the buckets and you're trying to prioritize and you're trying to schedule everything, it just leads out... It leads to burnout, it leads to being stressed, it leads to being, you know, feeling like you're never getting anything done because you're trying to do too many things at once.
[00:29:27] Caroline: Totally. Like, it just comes down to, you have to be realistic about your capacity, and you have to be realistic about your ability to focus. So I've learned over and over and over again that when I try to split focus, like, when I try to parse my attention between ten different projects, it's like filling up a bucket. You know, ten buckets, one drop at a time. And not only is that difficult because you lose productivity switching from one thing to the next, but it also makes everything harder because you get discouraged. You're like, I don't even see this bucket filling up. And I have learned that by focusing, I can actually see that momentum faster, and then I can follow through on a project. I can see the actual results of that project, which then fuels me into the next project. And so a lot of it for me is about... is about momentum and it's about motivation. And so that's where my discipline for being focused comes from. And I'm not saying I do it well 100% of the time. As an idea person, it's actually tremendously difficult. But I just, it's a mindfulness thing. Like, every day, I'm like, okay, if I just give myself one big thing today, if I can just focus. Like, I have a screensaver on my computer that says, focus brings ease. And every time I load up my computer, that's what I'm reminded of. Focus brings ease, because every time I have the ability to follow through on one thing, it makes everything easier. It makes me more motivated. It makes me feel like I can do what I want to do.
[00:30:48] Jason: Yeah. Cool. All right, anything else?
[00:30:51] Caroline: That's it. Hope it was helpful. And we're going to continue to have a million different ideas. And this is something that we're going to practice on a regular basis, but hope it gave you some ideas about how to handle that in your own business.
[00:31:01] Jason: Awesome. Great stuff. Hope you enjoyed it, Leah and metaphorical Leah. And we will be back in your ears next week with another episode.
[00:31:08] Caroline: Thanks for listening.
[00:31:09] Jason: Bye.
[00:31:09] Caroline: Bye.
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