Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to be more successful and satisfied — and build a career or company you love.
Today’s one thing: Getting it all done.
That one thing, better: Planning to get it all done.
You have too much work.
No problem, you think: You know how to grind! One more email. One more task. It feels good to just get it done…
But wait, let’s be honest: Does it really feel good?
No. It feels bad. It feels like you’re trapped. Like heart-pounding anxiety and a list of sacrifices. Because no matter what you do, there’s always more to be done — and no time to get away.
I feel this too. So today, I’ll share what I’ve done to settle down… and enjoy life while still being productive.
It all starts with some incredible advice from Shonda Rhimes…
How to tackle too much work
Shonda Rhimes has a lot to do. She’s an accomplished showrunner and screenwriter, with credits including Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder, Bridgerton, and more.
To balance all this, she leans on a lesson she learned early in her career.
When Shonda was producing her first season of Grey’s Anatomy, she’d work until 10 or 11 pm. But one of her colleagues went home at 6:30 or 7. “I would look at him with such rage,” she says.
Then her colleague told her something powerful: “Shonda,” he said, “this work will always be there tomorrow.”
“Now I understand,” Shonda says. “You’re never going to cut down the mountain to make it flat. It’s always going to be a mountain. I try to focus on climbing this piece of the mountain, and then think about climbing the rest of it later.”
I read this anecdote in Fast Company years ago, and I have pictured the visual metaphor ever since. In front of us is a mountain. If we try to flatten it, all we do is exhaust ourselves — and yet the mountain remains.
True as that may be, I know it doesn’t exactly solve your problem — because there’s still lots of work to do! So let’s strategize how to tackle that mountain.
“If not now, when?”
Know that phrase? It’s credited to Hillel the Elder from about 2,000 years ago, as he urges people to advocate for and improve themselves, and it now makes regular cultural appearances (see: novel, movie, album, more).
In theory, I love this thinking. If something is important, then do it now. Why wait?
But practically speaking, we cannot always think this way. Not everything can happen now! There is literally not enough time in the day — and, just as importantly, not enough energy in our bodies.
So let’s revise the phrase.
OLD: If not now, when?
NEW: It doesn’t have to happen now. You just need to know when.
Why is that better? Well, let’s return to Shonda Rhimes’s metaphor. She described work as a mountain — which is to say, a large, dense, singular mass. When we’re overwhelmed, we feel the enormity of our work. All demands become lumped together.
But work is not actually like a mountain. Work is more like a pyramid of blocks. Like this:
Work is an interconnected series of component parts. This means they can be broken apart — and once you see them separately, you can decide when each task gets accomplished.
Let’s look at your week ahead.
Is it busy? I bet it is — just like mine.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, try this: List out everything you need to do this week — all the big, important, pressing, time-consuming, energy-sucking projects.
Now look at your calendar. Where are the openings? When do things get done?
Start assigning tasks to times. I find it helpful to literally chart it out, with these three categories:
- The task
- The deadline
- When it gets done
Like this:
I know — this is not rocket science. It’s not even bottlerocket science.
But it felt like a revelation for me. This helped me visualize my week ahead, and it helped me understand my work differently.
I used to think: “I have so much to do, and I can’t get it all done now.”
Today I think: “I have a lot to do, but I can get it all done in time.”
It’s about how you use your time.
Here’s an example of how I use mine.
For the past year, I’ve been releasing this newsletter every Tuesday. As you know, I just added a second, premium newsletter that comes out every Friday.
This has given me some anxiety. It’s now double the newsletters to write, in what was already a limited amount of time. When will I get this done? I wondered.
So I created a schedule. I write best in the mornings, so the newsletter is now how I start every day. Monday and Tuesday are devoted to writing the Friday Premium newsletter. Then Wednesday and Thursday are devoted to writing the next week’s free Tuesday newsletter. (To be exact: I’m writing this sentence on Wednesday, November 29, at 10:13 am, and it will be sent on Tuesday, December 5.) My other tasks —Entrepreneur editing, podcasts, etc. — are slotted in at other times.
This helps me avoid a panic. It tells me: This is when you’ll get things done.
And just as importantly, it tells me: You don’t need to be working all the time.
Because that’s the really critical part of this. If you know when your work will get done, you don’t have to worry about doing it all the time. You can instead devote some time to everything else — friends, family, hobbies, a walk, a quiet moment, whatever gives you the energy to do the work later.
Now whenever I struggle to pull myself away from work, I ask myself these questions: Do I know what I need to do? And am I making the time to do it? If the answers are yes and yes, then I go and enjoy something else — knowing, as Shonda Rhimes does, that the mountain will still be there for me later.
It doesn’t have to happen now. You just need to know when.
That’s how to do one thing better.
