Your To-Do Is Lying to You: How to Stop Working on the Wrong Stuff - Marci Rossi

Website: https://www.marcirossi.com/

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00:00 Welcome to your To Do List is lying to you? How to stop working on the wrong stuff. I'm Marci Rossi, a business coach for new coaches and online service providers who want a business that actually works, not one that eats up their whole life. I've helped so many women build back end systems and strategies that actually free them up to do the work that only they can do and that they actually got in business for in the first place.  

00:29 I'm also a recovering perfectionist who has wasted a lot of time on the wrong things and I want to spare you that now. No matter what stage you're at in your business, if you're watching this, it's probably because your To Do List feels like it's growing faster than your business is and you just need help prioritizing. And if that's the case, you are not alone and there is nothing wrong with you. You're probably just doing the wrong type of work. So in this session, we're going to get crystal clear on how to tell the difference between what's truly moving your business forward and what's just keeping you busy.  

01:08 Now most business owners I know are the complete opposite of lazy. They're working long days, They've got a million things to and probably 1000000 browser tabs open. But things will stop. Revenues inconsistent, growth is slow, visibility is meh. And the sneaky reason why is your To Do List is lying to you. Just because something is on your list doesn't mean it's worth your time. And if you're honest with yourself, I bet a lot of what you're doing is just filler. The stuff you do when you're overwhelmed, avoiding visibility, or just want to feel productive. That's what we're fixing today. So First off, why do we keep ourselves so busy? Because the right work, the real work, can be uncomfortable.  

01:51 It makes us vulnerable. We might fail. Sometimes we avoid the things that will make life easier in the long run because they just feel like they take way too much time in the present to even bother setting up. And busy work feels safe. It feels like progress even when it's not. Essentially, we get stuck in the busy work trap out of fear. Fear of failure that's creating a brand new lead magnet before you've really launched your first one. Fear of visibility. That's saying you're too busy to email your email list this week. Lack of clarity. That's spending an hour figuring out which offer to promote next without actually talking about either one.  

02:32 But the longer you stay in busy work land, the longer you stay stuck. And honestly, your business and future customers deserve more of you. Here's the thing. Some work builds momentum. That's the good stuff. The stuff that creates visibility, connection, clients, cash. Some work brings stability. It keeps the wheels turning in your business it's not necessarily moving you forward, but it's helping you kind of maintain the level that you've already built. And some work just burns your time. It drains your energy and gives you nothing in return other than the satisfaction of crossing it off your list, which, let's be honest, feels good. So how do you know which kind of work you're doing? Because let's be real, when you're in the middle of it, everything feels important.  

03:21 That's where this next piece comes in. It's a super simple framework that I use with my clients and customers to help you get clear on what's worth your time, what you can hand off to a tool, and what you should just forget about all together. This is the lens I use to filter every task and to help my clients stop spinning their wheels. The brain bot busy work framework.  

03:42 Because once you know which type of work you're actually doing, it gets a whole lot easier to figure out what to keep, what to systematize, and what to just delete forever. Now, the vast majority of tasks that we do fall into one of these three buckets. Brain work, bot work, and busy work. Brain work is the stuff that only you can do. Bot work is what should probably be handled by tech, and busy work is, well, it's what looks productive but pays you exactly 0$ But as we'll see, our brain likes to trick us into not seeing busy work for what it really is.  

04:18 So let's take a deep dive into each one. Brain work is that high level, high impact stuff that only you can do like I mentioned, this is where your vision, your strategy, your voice, and your value live. It's your zone of genius. It's things like strategic thinking, outlining a new offer, planning a launch, setting your quarterly business goals, writing your outreach or your nurture emails, brainstorming collaborations and partnerships you might like to get involved in, and also your client meetings or delivery of client work. And too often, it's the work that gets constantly interrupted or just pushed to the bottom of the list. But brain work is where your best ideas and strategies come from, and it's the easiest to ignore because it's not usually loud or urgent.  

05:05 If you want to actually protect it, you have to treat it like it matters. That means setting boundaries and routines around it, which could look something like blocking off CEO days on your calendar every quarter. These are days with no meetings, no client work, just deep work. Thinking, reviewing, strategizing, deciding what's next. Try starting your days with your own priorities. Not your inbox, not your notifications, not what someone else is asking from you.  

05:32 Protect your energy like it's capital, because it is. If you're trying to write sales copy after back-to-back calls and four hours of Zoom, it's not happening. At least not at the best of your ability. And finally, Gatekeeper calendar. Not everything needs to be a call. Not everyone gets instant and unlimited access to you. This is your business and you get to decide how your time is spent. And protecting your time isn't selfish, it's how you serve from the best possible version of yourself.  

06:02 If you're constantly too tired to think clearly, that's not a time management issue, it's a brain work protection issue. Now bot work is repeatable, predictable, and honestly not really worth your time to keep doing manually. This is the kind of work that should be handled by your tools, your automations, or even templates. If you've done it more than a couple times and haven't automated or templatized it, you're not running your business, you're babysitting it. These are things like manually sending out on boarding emails, sending out scheduling events and reminders, manually adding leads to your CRM, answering the same questions via email over and over and over again, uploading your pod episodes to YouTube after you publish them, sending out a testimonial request when someone finishes a program, writing meeting notes during or after your calls.  

06:54 All of these can be handled by tools so that you set it up once and forget it. And that's the really nice thing about this. There is a time investment upfront, but then it just runs in the background while you get to focus on more important things. So how can we move some of those manual tasks into bot work? There are countless ways to automate things, but here are a few ideas to kind of get the ball rolling for you. Instead of manually scheduling events or asking people to contact you via email or a form to book, use a scheduling app and set up email reminders for the calls.  

07:28 Create a simple onboarding flow in your email service provider or your CRM so that new customers get exactly what they need right away. Set up Zaps to automatically save your content in Airtable or their preferred softwares that you can reuse and repurpose. Trigger a testimonial request when someone hits a particular milestone or a particular date. Automatically tag your leads based on how you join your list.  

07:52 I have the example here about Quiz because that is one of my most popular lead magnets, and technology can really help you with that. Now, if you're not familiar with tools like Zapier or email, automations it might take you a little bit of time to get comfortable with them. But once you've played around with them a little bit, automations like these are fairly simple to set up. And just a side note, spending time learning these tools, that's busy work. Asking a biz bestie for help or paying someone to do it for you, that frees you up for more brain work.  

08:23 And you don't have to automate everything in your business, but every manual task that you eliminate is more space for the work that only you can do, and that actually moves you forward. Finally, we have busy work, which sadly is where I see most business owners spend the majority of their time. I'll be honest, I'm guilty of this as well because it feels productive. It gives you that little dopamine hit, but it doesn't actually grow your business. It's the kind of things that you do when you're avoiding something more meaningful or when you're not really sure what matters most. It's things like tinkering with your website, taking yet another course, creating another freebie when you still haven't really launched the first one, testing out new tools that you probably won't end up using, scrolling on social media for research, picking new brand colours, tagging every email that comes in with colour coded labels and putting it in the perfect folders.  

09:22 I once spent almost a full day exploring alternatives to Click Up, which is what I use for so many things in my business, and at the end I ended up sticking with Click Up. At the time, it felt like I was moving forward, like this tool was what was slowing me down and if I can find the perfect tool, then I'll finally make progress. If you love playing with new tools as much as I do, or if you just sometimes, occasionally suffer from FOMO, let me save you a lot of trouble.  

09:48 There is no perfect tool, no perfect system, no perfect setup. Perfectionism is just procrastination in a nicer outfit, and it's keeping you broke. And look, I know you already know this, but if you're still spending 90 minutes looking for the perfect photo on Canva or downloading templates that you're never actually going to use, you're not actually doing it. A quick side note here, because you might be wondering what about the stuff that's not brain work or busy work, but you can't exactly automate it either. That's where delegation comes in. Think of delegation like an upgrade for the ball work. So once you've trimmed and automated anything that you can, the next level is handing off the remaining repeatable but human needed tasks to Ava or other team member.  

10:36 Things like inbox triage or customer service, editing your podcast, setting up your course platform. Things you don't really need to spend your brain power on but they're not bad or wasteful tasks either, and they do contribute value to your business. They just don't need to be yours to keep doing forever. But there's a reason delegation isn't my framework. If you delegate before your business is set up to run smoothly, you're just handing off chaos. And you can't expect Ava or a team member to clean up a mess that they honestly didn't make.  

11:08 So here's my take on delegation. Delegation is a next level move, but the first move is filtering. Automate what you can, ditch what doesn't matter and protect the brain work only then, when what's left is clean, clear, and under control, as the commercial says, that's when you actually hand it off. So getting back to our framework, this is where things get a little sneaky. Some things feel like brain work, but they're actually just glorified busy work. Things like rewriting your sales page week after week, redoing your logo, over researching for a podcast episode that you don't ever actually end up recording.  

11:45 Now, we could argue that some of these are actually building our business because redoing our brand as a professional brand makes us appear more trustworthy, and an optimized sales page leads to more conversions. But the most beautiful branding in the world and the most perfect sales page aren't actually going to build your business if you never actually get them out there. So if you're endlessly refining, researching or redoing without ever shipping it, that's not strategy, that's stalling. And I have a magic question for you to help you tell the difference between brain work and busy work.  

12:22 The next time you find yourself neck deep in Canva or about to reorganize all of your files all over again, stop and ask. Is this helping me get seen, get paid, or get clarity? And if the answer is no, walk away. Seriously, go get a coffee reset and come back to something that actually moves your business forward. I can tell you that this question alone has saved me so many wasted hours. Now let me show you what this actually looks like when it plays out before we implement this framework.  

12:52 Most people that I work with are more in the chaos mode. They are doing a ton of things but it's random, reactive, exhausting. Their To Do List is packed, but they're not really seeing any traction afterwards it's not about working more it's not working differently. You're not doing things manually you're setting things up properly once and then allowing them to run in the background. You're not in reaction mode, constantly switching between tasks.  

13:19 You're letting your systems do the heavy lifting for you, and then you finally have some space to think. You're not constantly creating. You are getting out in front of your ideal audience with what you already have, and you're not ending your days and weeks wondering what the heck you actually did. You've made clear progress towards your goals. You're focused, you're intentional. And a lot of that little stuff? It's either handled automatically or it doesn't even make the list anymore. So as much as I love planners, you don't need a new planner or just more willpower. All you need is a better filter.  

13:56 And here it is. Protect your brain work. Automate your bot work. Ditch your busy work. Because if you don't, you're going to spend another six months working your ass off wondering why you're not seeing the results with all that effort, you'll end up launching from a place of burnout. You'll plateau at just getting by. Or worse, you burnout completely and start fantasizing about getting a real job. But you built this business for a reason and it deserves to reach the people that you were meant to serve. This is the work I do with my clients we built businesses that actually function behind the scenes so they can show up, deliver their magic and grow without constantly playing catch up.  

14:40 So if you're tired of doing everything right and still spinning your wheels, this is where we start this framework. It's simple, but it's powerful when you actually commit to it. Let it be easy, let it be clear, and for the love of your business, stop wasting your best energy on the wrong stuff because time is your most valuable resource. So start treating it like ACEO, not a task rabbit. Now, if you're not sure what to replace the busy work with, this is where I recommend starting.  

15:09 I call them the revenue rituals, and they are three simple, repeatable actions that bring in leads, build trust, and remind people that you're actually open for business. These three daily rituals, doing something related to outreach, visibility, and inviting people to work with you are how I build momentum in my business, even when I have no motivation whatsoever and 12 tabs open in my brain and on my desktop. They take maybe 30 minutes a day, but they actually work, which is more than I can say for half of the stuff that a lot of people do on autopilot. If you want to make these rituals part of your daily rhythm, I have a free guide that breaks down what exactly they are, gives you examples and has a tracker in it.  

15:50 If you scan the QR code here, you can grab it. And I think you'll be shocked by what shifts when you do this for just 30 days. At the end of the day, it's about devoting our precious time to what actually matters and just letting go of the rest. Your business doesn't grow because you put in more hours and more time, it grows because the hours that you do put in are on high impact activities because you stop wasting your best hours on the wrong things. So to summarize, your brain work builds your business, but work supports it and busy work buries it.  

16:26 And I can tell you with 100 % certainty the ones who protect their brain work automate the rest and stay consistent with simple repeatable actions, those are the ones that grow and that could be you too. So the next time your To Do List is out of control, don't ask what should I do first. Ask what's worth it. That's how you build a business that actually works for you. Thank you.