Better Than A To-Do List

What's happening? Happy Thursday. Come on in here. Good to have you. Man, here in Daytona Beach, I've got to tell you, what a nice day. It's still kind of warm.

It's like 83, which is cool for us, I guess. But the humidity dropped out of the air and just the taste of fall is here. I'm thinking pumpkin spice latte. We'll see.

Let me ask you a question. Are you a productivity person? You like to get stuff done? Do you have a to-do list? I have two. I have one that kind of handles the daily multiplying rabbits.

And I have one that I use to run my life and keep me sane. I haven't talked about this for a long time. You're going to learn this today. If you haven't heard this very simple way of thinking, it'll change your life.

And that's not overpromising. It really does. It is a daily boost. From MotivationToMove.com, my name is Scott Smith. Thank you for stopping by today.

Today's the day I've been talking about my Face Your Passion community. for a very long time. And right now, as of this moment, when you hear this podcast, it is open.

It's on school. S K double L.com slash face your passion, or go to face your passion.com. It'll redirect you over there. Face your passion. It's a battle cry.

It's a mission. It's a goal in and of itself. What does that mean? It all means that my life and anybody I work with as a client and you too, if I have my way with you, is that you get out of bed every single day and say, listen, there's something in my heart, something I want to do.

I don't care what it is. Make more money, be a better person, have more impact, doesn't matter. But today, we're not going to sit back and wait for it to happen. We're going to figure out how to go after it and we're going to go through it until we get there.

As a group, that's what we do. So if that is something you want to know more about and something you want to be a part of, whether it's personal or making money, whatever it is, I don't care what it is. We handle life, man.

It's all about the humans and what we want to do. Go to faceyourpassion.com, check out the community. Now, something kind of funny before I get on with the show today that we were going to open today at 10 a.m.

But I promised people that got on my list, I said, listen, if you allow me to send you a notification that we're open, I will give you the chance to grab one of my founder's deals. It's half price. a price you keep forever, and you'll be the very first of my best friend forever. And so as I'm doing this podcast right now, I've decided here in about an hour, I'm going to send that email and just open the doors.

And then I'm going to sit there and wait on a live broadcast inside the group, and I'm going to welcome them as they come in. It's kind of fun. I'll record it as you can see it, okay?

So when you hear this today, it's already open. It's a small group. It's going to take me a couple of months to build this thing up. If I were you, I'd come on in.

Just go to faceyourpassion.com, read the About page, watch the video. If it's for you, join. If it's not for you, fine. Don't worry about it. If you get in, you don't like it, no problem.

I'll give you money back, okay? It's okay. I just want to come in and help you. I want to have some fun. I want to have a great community. So that's what we're doing, all right?

How about that stuff? We got stuff to do. We got some learning. Okay, let's get into this right now, okay? So everybody wants to be more productive. Isn't AI supposed to do that for me?

It is, it is, but it also makes a lot more work. So we're going to go a little bit old school today and help you get more productive, handle a busy day, especially if you use a traditional to-do list.

I use a to-do list. Yes, absolutely. A friend of mine the other day said, I've gone back to pen and paper constantly. I said, what are you doing, man?

You don't have to use pen and paper for everything. You have to have kind of some technology behind you to handle all the stuff that pops up these days. Recurring tasks and things like that.

So I've got my to-do list. We have multiplying rabbits. We have things in the business, things in life, things that keep happening. Way too much to keep up with.

And by the way, if you want some sanity... Follow the David Allen approach to getting things done. And, you know, there's something in neuro-linguistic programming called an open loop.

Now, an open loop is basically an idea that's going around inside your head all the time that it kind of keeps messing with you. When we take that, we dump it into a to-do management thing.

We don't have it in our brain anymore. So it does calm us down. And there's so much activity now. And we do need a to-do list just to kind of check things off.

But a lot of you guys are living on your to-do list. And, man, that's not how you get things done. So I'm going to make your day more fun by spinning this around. First off, I use Todoist for my control the rabbit recurring task kind of stuff that pops up, right?

Little things I don't want to remember all the time. I just manage it in Todoist about maybe twice a week. I go in there and just clean it up, make sure it's working pretty well. And that's the stuff that I, hey, I got to do this every single Thursday.

I want to know about that stuff. But in my mind, and sometimes on a piece of paper in front of me, I have a technique I learned from a flight instructor.

I call it a did I do it list. So traditional to-do lists will get the job done, but it's really very easy to start focusing on the list and check things off and not getting the good, important stuff that maybe might keep you alive.

What might keep you alive? Yeah. Like I said, I learned it from a flight instructor. See, when I learned to fly, it was a bit overwhelming. When you learn to fly, I was flying Cessna 172s at the time.

But if you haven't flown before, you're kind of learning like 110, 120 years of aviation all in one shot. It can be very overwhelming. Plus, it's an airplane that goes up in the air.

And a lot can go wrong. And so that's why pilots check pretty much everything. It's a pre-flight. They check everything before they fly. Because not that it's going to go wrong, but if you can mitigate it, you're better off.

Because I don't know, if you're 5,000 feet up in the air and something goes wrong, we got a big problem, don't we? Jump in your car, it's not that big a deal. Airplane it is.

So I'm freaking out by it, trying to get it right. And I do the outside of the plane, the exterior, the walk around. And then I get on the inside, I do the inside. And we follow a checklist.

And I'm going around and I'm looking at this thing. And I'm like, okay, read this, make sure it's done. Read this, make sure. It was overwhelming. He said, man, you're stressing out about it.

I said, yes, I am. Look at all the things I have to check off here. He goes, well, don't do that. He says, start looking at the airplane and say, well, did I do it?

Hmm, did I do it? And I began to look at it. So I'd look at the tail and I'd say, did I check that? Nope, let me go check it. I'd see the gas tank. Did I check to see if it has fuel?

Does the fuel have water in it? Is it ready to fly? Nope, better check it. Then I take a look at the landing gear, make sure it's in good shape. Yeah, I did that one.

I'm good. As soon as I went to Did I Do It, what it did was it took the stress of going through the list and checking things off. And instead of that, I go through and I just make sure I had it done. Now, when I take this into real life, normal, everyday life, like I said, the rabbits all pop up.

But within the list that I have every single day, there's just a couple of things that are important. This is an offshoot from, I forgot who I learned this from. I think David Allen may teach this one as well.

You've probably heard this before. I always want to do three things that are important every single day. That's it. Now, three things could be, you know, kiss my wife.

That could be one of them. It's important that day. Or it could be, gosh, you've got to make a call, got to go to the bank, things like that. Three things that are important that will move your life forward every single day.

That's it. There could be a hundred things on your to-do list, but only three things are really important. So when I apply what I learn in an airplane, keep me alive, I need some gas, right?

Landing gear needs to be good, right? There's a couple of things that are really important. Maybe the radio has to work. Otherwise, you know, it's not that big a deal.

But in life, every single day, there are three things that may be very important to you that maybe will move you forward closer to a goal that maybe are things that you really have to take care of. You know, it's tax day and you haven't done your taxes yet.

So here's how the did I do it list works in my life today and how you can apply it today. So you have your list of all the million things you have to do.

It's all there. We all have it. But on that list, there are three important things. If you did today, three times how many days in a year? Do the math and imagine how much you can get done.

If you look at your list today and you just know the three things you have to do today. So let's talk about this today in terms of me. Today is Wednesday. I'm doing this.

I have really three things to do, basically. What do I have to do? Let me think about this. Well, I have a group coaching call at 7 a.m. in the morning.

I got to do that. I love that call. I have a couple of coaching calls I have to do otherwise, and I have to do a podcast. That's kind of my day. If I get those things done, I've covered everything I have to do and I'm good to go.

I had the kind of optional that I wanted to launch the Face Your Passion Group on Thursday. And because I had the three things and that's all I had to do to get done just I knew I had to cover, I noticed I had extra time to go ahead and launch up early on the Face Your Passion Group.

It became optional. See how that works? So the first thing you want to do is have a place to capture all the things that need to be done all the time.

My use to do is for that. The second thing you have to do is just know every single time you look at your day that there's only three things in that day. You don't have to remember them. You just look at it and know, hey, I got to be on a couple of calls.

I got to do a podcast and maybe I'll do that launch today too. Life gets so much nicer. And I'll tell you what, the best part of doing this is that instead of chasing your check marks all day long, you're actually focused on three things that will move the bar forward. For some people, I know one of the things I have to do is meditate.

Other people say, I don't have time for meditation. Well, if it's important to you and you get it done, I can tell you people do it. It changes their lives. Some people say, if I just work out at the gym today, if I got that done, everything else will change.

It's true. So let me go back over this so you got it, okay? Number one, keep everything in a place like Todoist because you got to keep up with life. There's stuff that keeps going on.

But every single day when you get up and go to work, you want to face your passion. And if you want to face your passion, that means you've got to pay attention to what moves you forward and doesn't just keep you spinning your wheels. That's when the did I do it list comes into play.

It's so simple when you start thinking this way. I teach awareness all the time because the reason is this. You get caught up in life, life gets in the way, and before you know it, you're focused on the checkmark instead of what's really important. What I just told you will change everything about how you think.

If you like this way and you want to think this way and you want to hang out with people that do think this way and you want me to teach you more about it, go to faceyourpassion.com. Get that founder's rate. Join the community because as soon as we get 100 people, the price goes up. I don't want that to happen to you.

You're hearing about this early on. Take advantage of it.