Courtesy of Cait Scudder
Cait Scudder.
- Cait Scudder is a Forbes-featured business coach, TEDx speaker, podcast host, and success mentor for driven women.
- She said that a traditional to-do list may be "the opposite of productive" for busy entrepreneurs because it lacks clear details, categories, and timelines.
- Instead, Scudder suggests four techniques for CEOs to streamline their workload, such as delegating tasks to the appropriate team members and reverse engineering the path to long-term goals.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
If your 2020 goals included growing your business, staying more organized, and keeping on top of your own and your team's to-do list, keep reading.
You might be going about this thing the wrong way.
While in the beginning of the year it can be tempting to cling to the shiny new planners, project management tools, and to-do list templates to keep you focused and on track, there's a more far more simple and impactful tool you can use (and if you're a CEO of a growing company, you should use).
While there is research that suggests that writing a to-do list can help to decrease anxiety and provide order to an otherwise chaotic barrage of disassembled thoughts, if you're an entrepreneur looking to scale a company, throwing miscellaneous tasks down on a page is often the opposite of productive.
The biggest challenge entrepreneurs face is being able to vacillate between the competing priorities of day-to-day operations (think: client work, content creation, administrative duties, correspondence) and strategic forward planning (think: long term brand growth, sales strategy, etc).
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, who oftentimes have to switch back and forth between working in and on the business, putting all to-do items on a sprawling list seems to create the feeling of more work to do, less work done. This in turn can negatively impact motivation and follow-through.