The Three Levers of Important but Not Urgent Tasks
I was chatting with Christoph (a Tacklebox Member + Uncomfy Hour All-Star) this past week about content and how it’ll play a pivotal role in his business, whether it ends up being his core product or a top of funnel / mid funnel conversion tactic.
Christoph is like most of you in that he’s got a job and a family and responsibilities outside of his startup. But, even within the work he does on his startup, content never seems urgent. Because it isn’t. Whether Christoph writes a great blog post or not this week probably won’t matter in the near term. The feedback loop for most content, or the accumulation of a content catalog, is long. The feedback loop for responding to an email is short. So emails tend to win.
Further, since all the work you’re doing as a founder is uncomfortable, it’s especially hard to spend your limited time on something that’s uncomfortable and isn’t going to give you some sort of immediate value.Content might not be relevant for you/your business, but you can swap content with something else your future self would love for you to do today but your present self dreads or avoids.The big point here is that if you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur you need a system to do stuff you don’t feel like doing when you don't feel like doing it.
I don’t like working out — I love playing sports — but hopping on a treadmill is like walking on legos barefoot. So, I have a trainer that I work with over Zoom 3x/week. Probably 60% of the time I absolutely dread it. But, I do the dumb Turkish Get Ups (an unreasonably hard thing my trainer makes me do) because I’ve paid and scheduled the time. And, a year and a half after starting, I've missed exactly one session and I feel great. Plus, each time I finish a workout I really didn't want to do, I feel even better.
Reminding yourself you can do stuff when you don't want to do it is empowering. The Eisenhower Matrix is useful and I recommend it - if you aren’t familiar, it’s just placing your tasks on this chart before you do them to make sure they’re on the right side of the graph:
I’ve tweaked it for entrepreneurs —
But, this still tends to let things in the bottom right sit forever because there will always be urgent things to do, either with your startup or outside of it.
So, back to that system to make you repeatedly do the stuff you don't want to do.
There are three pillars for it: Scheduling, committing, and dissecting. They each have one rule.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say you want to write two pieces of content each month. These aren’t urgent, but they’re important - eventually they’ll attract customers, convert customers, act as lead magnets, act as value you can send in cold emails. Just writing them will be useful, too. Writing content forces you to think of a specific problem your customer has that you can solve in 700 words (a dam in the river you can help them navigate), to create a title that describes an outcome they’d love to reach, to develop your specific, unique point of view and to present it persuasively. Here's how it might look:
Scheduling - first, you need to schedule time to do the thing. I recommend earlier in the morning, before you feel the weight of the other urgent things.
The one rule for scheduling - you can't do anything but the thing. If you schedule 6-645 in the morning on Tuesday, you need to sit down at 6 and stay until 6:45. You don’t have to work on whatever you held the time for, but you can’t do anything else. No emails, no texts, no meditation. You can either sit quietly, or do the work you said you would. Try this out - it works oddly well.
So, your schedule might be Tuesdays and Fridays from 6-645am for content writing.
Committing - next, you need to have consequences for missing your scheduled time. I pay my trainer whether I show up or not, so I always show up. Also, I don’t want to let him down.
The one rule for committing: it has to hurt to miss it. It has to be public, or embarrassing, or expensive. Or a combo of the three. Working with people helps this happen. Grab another member (happy to match you up if you need, respond to this email) and hop on Zoom and cowork.
Your commit might be coworking with another member at that time, and if one of you doesn’t show you have to donate $50 to the other’s charity of choice. Whatever it is, you need to really not want it to happen.
Dissecting - finally, you have to make the time you spend easier on yourself by creating momentum before your scheduled time. For example, when I schedule my time to plan the podcast, I break it up. For the first hour, Thursdays at 7am-8am, my goal is to come up with 10 ideas for an episode and send them to a group of listeners to see which resonates. Once I have the idea, the next scheduled hour is putting that idea into a three-part framework - the big question I’ll answer, my three biggest thoughts on it, and an example for each of the three.
The one rule for dissecting: It has to have boundaries. Saying you’ll “write” from 6-7 is ambiguous, and ambiguous things are uncomfortable. Saying you’ll come up with 10 ideas for a post seems manageable. Maybe you finish what you said you’d do in 40 minutes and can push forward for the next 20. The point is making it as easy as possible to get some momentum.
For our content example, it might be listing 10 problems you’ve heard from customer interviews that would be worth exploring in a post.
To be successful, you’ll need to work on important, durable stuff when you don’t feel like doing it and won't be rewarded for it any time soon. Building a system for that, and practicing it, proves to yourself that you can.