A few weeks ago I sat down at my desk with a blank page and wrote out every single thing I was trying to move forward in the business.
It wasn’t a to-do list.
The actual open objectives, the ones that had been sitting there for weeks, some of them for months.
This newsletter was one of them. It hadn't gone out in a couple of weeks.
My team kept gently reminding me.
Every time they did, I felt a small pang of guilt and shame.
“Sorry I didn’t get to it this week either” I’d say. Then I'd get pulled into whatever felt more urgent, and another few days’d fly by.
There were seventeen others just like it.
Different names, same pattern.
I kept adding to the list. By the time I stopped writing, I counted them.
Eighteen.
Eighteen???
I stared at that number for a while.
Eighteen different things I was supposedly working on, all at once, none of them getting the attention they needed to actually finish them.
For years I've told myself the problem with goals is willpower.
Just push harder.
But if that were true, pushing harder on eighteen things should have worked at least a little.
It didn't.
In a strange way what was even more frustrating was the fact that not a single one of the eighteen properly failed (somehow that was even more annoying to me)
If something had failed outright, at least I'd have known to stop.
Instead every one of them just idled along, technically still in "progress", each draining my psychic energy.
I'd close out most days feeling genuinely busy but a sense of not having made progress.
And I couldn't point to one single thing that had actually shipped.
Just eighteen things, each a little further along than yesterday, which felt like progress and wasn't.
I don't know how long I'd have kept doing that if I hadn't sat down and counted.
I said this on my own podcast a while back, half joking, half not: you can't have six planes take off from the same runway at the same time.
(Not unless you're a fighter pilot.)
Planes take off one at a time.
Every airport in the world works this way and somehow I'd never applied it to my own list.
So I picked one.
Just one thing to actually finish before anything else got real attention.
Everything else joined the back of the line ... waiting its turn.
It felt wrong at first and to some extent it still does!
But I did notice something: the one thing I picked actually moved.
For the first time in months.
I think I just needed to give myself permission.
Permission to let seventeen things sit unfinished for a while so the eighteenth can breathe.
What's the one thing on your list that would actually move if you let everything else wait?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Ciao for now,
Ash