Time is the ultimate non-renewable. If you’re serious about creating time for yourself, for your next step, for your family, for your fitness, for your career, for your Personal Brand and visibility, identify the extra things that are taking up your precious minutes, hours and days – things you’ll start to stop.

Rules of the Stop List:

1. Everyone talks about the Stop List
   Enlist help to support shedding the things that don’t serve. Tell your near and dear, your staff and colleagues, that you’re on a stop mission so they’ll not only keep you accountable, they’ll know that you’re not the go to for everything from ‘where are my socks’ to ‘what’s the zoom link for that meeting?’
   
2. Observe:
   Look at where time is spent each day and week. If, like me, this shows you’re consistently drawn into easy, shallow tasks, you may also recognise that they aren’t pushing you forward. There’s fleeting satisfaction as you tick things off, but reacting to that never ending ‘to-do’ list isn’t being in control of your life, it’s not even being in control of that list!
   
   A more valuable list is a made from writing down everything you do every day. Repeat the tasks, or make a tally beside those you do multiple times – the biggest tasks that you need to shed can be taken off your list earliest.
   
3. Understand your role and your function:
   What is the function you deliver? What do you increase: More revenue for clients, more sales and leads, more conversions, more courses, more events, bottoms on seats, clear reporting, compliance adherence, more clarity, more focus?
   
   Do you reduce stress, reduce debt, reduce tension, reduce overwhelm?
   
   This is your FUNCTION: what you increase and what you decrease. Everything else is surplus to requirements.
   Your CORE ROLE is what you do to make this function… function. Everything else, except those things that are necessary to life, soul and family, should be on your To Stop list
   
4. And just like that, you’ve written a job description
   Looking to hire? Your stop list is the job description for the role you need to fill or the tasks you can outsource.
   
   Spending time on your tax and BAS, your salaries and super? Hire a bookkeeper, or extend the remit of the BK you work with already.
   
   Doing too much admin? Hire a VA. Do you have a friend or associate who could also lighten their load? It may be a good time to discuss sharing a VA, if you don’t feel that you’re ready to managea full time assistant yet.
   
   Doom scrolling – don’t hire for that soul destroying mission. It doesn’t need to be back filled. Go cold turkey, or restrict it to designated time out zones.
   
5. Forgive, but don’t forget
   Stopping the doing won’t happen overnight. Be kind on yourself. It will happen eventually if you continue with doing the stopping.
   

WORK LESS EARN MORE

Clearing away the extras creates more time and space for what you want to be doing. If that is doing your job and Key Life Areas well, creating a stop list will give you more time to concentrate on those things – reducing the stress of not getting it all done.