How to Leave Things Undone and Let Bad Things Happen

There's an Asian Philosophy called something like "The Art of Leaving Things Undone"

If you're a personal training business owner you most likely have well over 100 things on your to do list. That's just the name of the game when you're in business for yourself.

Unfortunately most entrepreneurs get so caught up in the day to day busy work and unimportant ( yet seemingly urgent ) tasks that they never have time to get the important strategical tasks done to move the business forward.

I like the A, B, and C pile method.

If it's super important and you're the only one who can do it then it goes in the A pile.

If it's super important and you can outsource it then it goes in the B pile.

If it doesn't fall into either category then it goes into the C pile - which is the waste basket.

And the goal is to move as many projects from the A pile to B pile and from the B to C pile as possible so you can really get the important A+ level tasks done.

As entrepreneurs we want to make sure everything gets done now and that it gets done correctly…but actually this isn't the best mode of operation for moving the business forward.

We need to be OK with the fact that to really get things done we need to let a lot of things go and outsource as much as possible. We need to be OK with the fact that finding someone who does the job 85% correctly is about as good as we can hope for, because honestly no one is going to put as much love, effort and care into a job as the business owner, and if they did they would probably own their own business and not be working for us.

We need to be OK with allowing a large percentage of our to do list go undone and end up in the C pile. If you look at your to do list, I bet only 20 percent of it needs to be done by you.

Follow the 80/20 rule here. Or better yet, follow the 5/65/30 rule

5% - Do the most important strategical task yourself ( A pile )

65% - Outsource just about everything else ( B pile )

30% - Weed out the stuff that actually isn't all that important in moving the business forward and trash it ( C pile )

We need to be OK with the fact that if we absorb ourselves in the things that need to be done to move our business forward bad things are going to happen now and again. Like we might miss some phone calls and emails, deadlines etc. ( For a great blog post about this read The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen (and Weapons of Mass Distraction  ) by Tim Ferriss

To truly be successful as an entrepreneur is to be OK with understanding sometimes all the little things aren't going to get done, and usually a lot of them aren't all that important anyway.

Focus on the 5% and outsource and trash the rest.

This has been a fitness business time management post by Chris McCombs for Kick Back Life, a marketing strategies for a fitness training business website and blog with cutting-edge high quality content added on a regular basis including interviews, posts, articles, audio and video.