Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2699 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Not Get Overwhelmed With Everything I Need To Do Every Day? About this episode Does your daily to-do list feel like it’s running your life? Are you constantly juggling tasks, trying to stay productive, and wondering how anyone keeps up without burning out? If the day-to-day pressure of getting everything done is starting to wear you down, this episode is for you. Today’s question comes from Liam, who asked: “How do I not get overwhelmed with everything I need to do every day?” Omar shares a simple, repeatable system to help you cut through the chaos and focus on what really matters. You’ll learn why trying to finish everything is a trap and how to prioritize high-impact tasks, theme your week, and set hard stops that protect your time and energy. Want to feel more in control of your day? Hit the play button at the top of this page and get practical strategies you can use right away. Your schedule doesn’t have to run you, you’ve got this. To submit your questions, visit 100mba.net/q. Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.
0:45 Speaker 00 Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then, we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. Welcome to Q&A Wednesday here on the $100 MBA Show. This is where I answer your questions about starting, growing, and scaling your business. Today's question comes from Liam. And Liam asks, "How do I not get overwhelmed with everything I need to do every day?" This is a great question, Liam, because I believe that overwhelm is one of the biggest
1:30 Speaker 00 killers of productivity, creativity, and just pure joy in entrepreneurship. The thing is that you need to understand one fundamental rule when it comes to business in general, and that is, you will never finish everything, but you can absolutely manage your day so you feel like you're in control and you're making progress.
1:58 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:11 Speaker 00 Real quick, if these episodes help you in any way, hit the follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. So that's the first thing we need to establish. You will never finish. You need to understand that finished doesn't exist in business. There's always going to be more to do, more customers, more money to be made, more emails, more tasks, more fires to put out. You're just never going to be finished. You need to just understand that, believe that, and just be at peace with that. The secret isn't about doing everything. It's about doing the right things in the right order. Once you accept that you'll never cross off
2:53 Speaker 00 every single thing in your to-do list in your head, the weight comes off your shoulders, right? You start to relax, you start to mature a little bit, and the question shifts from "how do I do it all?" to "what matters most right now?" So I want to share with you my system, the system that works for me, in hopes that you can give it a try and get some relief, okay? It's exactly what I recommend to everybody I work with in the $100 MBA program, in my life, my own team members, everybody that approaches me and says, "I feel overwhelmed." This is what I tell them to do. At the end of the day, ideally, at the end of your workday, you do your planning, and I call this a "brain dump."
3:38 Speaker 00 It's kind of a great exercise to do at the end of the day for whatever you're going to work on the next day, because you want to just jump in the next day, ready to go, ready to implement. Now, if for some reason you're burnt out, or you're running out of time, then make sure you do this the first thing in the morning when you start your workday. So what is a "brain dump"? You want to write down everything you think you need to do, either for tomorrow, if you're doing it at the end of the day, or for that day. If you're doing in the morning, big or small, write everything. Don't be critical about what these things are. Just write them all down. So for example, I have on my list, shoot a video ad, right? I also have processed payroll with bookkeeper. I have a doctor's visit, gym, I have to go to the gym.
4:23 Speaker 00 Reply to a customer email that was sent to me personally. Record this podcast episode. So you get it. It's just a brain dump of everything I think I need to do. This gets the chaos out of your head and onto paper or onto your task lists on your screen. You can't prioritize what you can't see. Okay. If you don't have it out of your head, you don't know what's important, or you don't know which order to do them in. The next step is to underline your non-negotiables. These are things that you must do no matter what. And these are basically your high level priority tasks that allow you to continue to have the life and business you have. So for me, health is always underlined, right? Going to the gym or having to go to the doctor, whatever.
5:08 Speaker 00 This I can't mess around with, right? This is something that is consistent. I must do this non-negotiable. Critical obligations like payroll, I need to do payroll. That's got to be underlined. Another one for me is commitments to other people, like a meeting that I agreed to. I need to underline that. These are things I always make sure I get done or I try to do them first. Because if you skip them, you're either hurting yourself or you're letting someone else down. Now, listen, you know yourself best. If you put off going to the gym at the end of the day and you just don't have the energy to even put on your shoes to go to the gym, then you better put it at the top of the day because it won't happen. But if you're the kind of person that likes to go to the gym at the end of the day because your brain is totally fried and you just want to go ahead
5:52 Speaker 00 and use your body at the gym instead, you know yourself, do what's best for you so that you get it done. You want to think of these as anchors of your day. Everything else has to fit around them. Next, I want you to circle the activities with the highest ROI, right? Return on investment, the things that actually directly create growth in your business. Ask yourself, if I only did one thing today. That moved the needle in my business, what would it be? And that's the top of your ROI list. Here are some examples. Recording a sales video that will run for months and bring in sales. Launch an ad campaign that's going to increase my marketing and allow me to get more qualified leads. Reaching out to a partnership lead. Or working on a product that I need to launch so that I can make more revenue.
6:37 Speaker 00 Notice what's not on the list. Tweaking your logo. Reorganizing your Dropbox. Spending two hours in your inbox. Right? No. Those things don't really move the needle. Once you've circled the most return on investment activities, you want to rank them in order of highest to lowest in terms of their return on investment. The holidays are the season business owners get pulled in six directions. More calls, more requests, more chances for things to slip through the cracks. Hoping you catch it all isn't a plan. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO. Spelt Q U O. The business phone built so you never miss a call or a customer. Ever have a lead call or text at 10:00 PM? QUO's AI agent handles both 24/7.
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9:08 Speaker 00 Then you want to schedule your day like this. Number one, non-negotiable activities. Number two, highest ROI activity. One activity, the most important thing you have to do that day. That's going to bring in revenue, it's going to help grow your business. Then, the next ROI activity, in terms of return on investment. And then, everything else that time allows. So, everything else goes below that. Now, know that you will not cross everything off at the end of the day. Understand that. But, in my opinion, the most important thing of the day are the first two. The non-negotiables and the highest ROI activity. If you accomplish those two things, then that day's a win. That day is successful. Anything on my list that I don't finish today, I then move on to the next day.
9:53 Speaker 00 But I use the same technique, the same methodology, where I start with the non-negotiables, and then I choose the highest return on investment activity, the highest ROI activity, from what's left over. And then, I say, "What's the next ROI activity?" And I go on and do the same thing. Here are a few bonus strategies for you. You might want to consider theming your days. I know a lot of people love this. For example, they say Monday is for marketing, Tuesdays for product, Wednesdays for sales. This keeps your brain in one mode instead of switching. Context switching is very taxing and tiring. I'm not a themed day guy, but some people love this, so you may want to try it. You also want to think about time blocking. Assigning chunks of time on your calendar for your work. If it's not blocked out in your calendar, it's probably not going to get done.
10:38 Speaker 00 And this allows you to kind of see milestones. Okay, this time block, I'm going to work on this. Then I'm going to have lunch. And then after this time block, I'm going to work on that. So you have clarity of when you're going to do what. And then you also confine yourself to a certain amount of time. Otherwise, you're going to just, just spend as much time as you want on a task and it might even bleed to the next day. Next, delegate, delegate as much as possible. Anything that you can train somebody to do in five minutes, get them to do it on your team. You can even outsource this to a part-time VA. These are tasks I call $10 tasks where, you know, they bring in $10 on average to your business. This is like replying to emails, scheduling, admin work. At the end of the day, you need to start delegating the stuff
11:23 Speaker 00 that's very time consuming, that's not actually bringing in the money. It's required for you to do so that you can run the business, but it's not really top end ROI driven tasks. I always say you should definitely delegate all your $10 tasks and $100 tasks. So you could focus on the $1,000 and $10,000 tasks. The tasks that bring in $1,000 and $10,000 in revenue. Like creating your product, like doing a sales webinar. You get it. Last tip, set a hard stop. Overwhelm really grows when you blur the lines between work and life. And I used to not do this rule. I used to just kind of work whenever and as long as I want. And that's not really good because that really encourages burnout. And I burnt out a bunch of times in early in my career because of that.
12:08 Speaker 00 So especially if you're side hustling, you want to make sure that whatever time slot you're working on your business, that you stick to it as much as possible. And you force yourself to get what you need to get done in that time law. And you'll be surprised how much you can get done when you hold yourself accountable with time. And I really encourage anybody to get one of these timers you can get from Amazon where you can set certain times and just have an alarm. And it's kind of seeing the time tick away kind of encourages you like, let me stay focused. Let me keep working hard on this. Let me get this thing done. So Liam and everybody who's listening and watching, how do you not get overwhelmed? Let me recap, okay? You want to, number one, accept the fact that you'll never be finished. You just need to accept that, okay?
12:50 Speaker 00 Next, you want to dump all your ideas, all your to-dos on paper or in your note-taking app, and just get it out of your head. Then underline all your non-negotiables, then circle and rank the highest ROI activities that are on that list, and then do them in that order. That's it. That's simple. And often, a simple system is a powerful system because you can repeat it. Overwhelm goes down when progress goes up. When you start feeling like you're getting things done, you're starting to feel good about yourself. And you just need to get a little organized so that you can get a lot more focused. Thanks for the great question, Liam. If you've got a question you want to ask here on Q&A Wednesday, don't forget to submit
13:30 Speaker 00 it over at 100mba.net/ q, and I'll answer it right here on Q&A Wednesday. Before you go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of business is just discipline, all right? It's just having the discipline to do what's important at any given time, and not get distracted with smaller things, easier things. Do the most important thing. Sometimes, and I would say probably often, the most important thing is the hardest thing. And you've just got to get disciplined enough to just tackle the most important thing, the most highest return on investment task that's going to help your business first. Get that done, move on to the next. Listen, if you are overwhelmed, and you're thinking, "Oh, I'm not sure about this.
14:14 Speaker 00 If I should, you know, use this system," just try it, okay? You've tried your way, and you're feeling overwhelmed. Try this way. You'll see what happens. And I'm pretty sure you're going to start to feel better. All right, I will see you in the next episode. Thanks so much for subscribing, listening, watching, and being part of our community. If you found today's episode helpful, and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business.
14:59 Speaker 00 And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
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