9 lists to make to radically improve your life and your business

I love a list. And despite living my life in Notion — my lists, my lists are pinned in my phone notes.

I’ve got lists for just about everything. Not to-do’s more things to think about or remember that don’t really fit anywhere else and I want to have quick and easy access to.

So as summer draws to a close, here are the nine that will (in my humble opinion) change your life and your business for the better…

The opposite of a to-do list. This is a list of the things you’ve decided aren’t worth your time, energy or money anymore.

Meetings that could be emails. Working weekends. Customising every proposal. Doing things manually that could be automated. Going to events you don’t actually want to attend. Saying yes when you mean no. Under-charging.

I read this as a little pick me up reminder whenever I’m having a moment where I feel one of my boundaries collapsing.

This is a list of tiny things that make you significantly happier than their cost or effort should justify.

Fresh sheets. Getting outside before you open your laptop. Flowers in the kitchen. Paying for the faster train. A hotel instead of the 6am flight. A takeaway coffee for your morning walk. A new book (I find it almost physically impossible to go to a bookshop without buying a new book). A game of Uno…

We spend a lot of time trying to improve our lives with enormous goals but sometimes you just need to identify the things that reliably make any given day 20% better and do them more often.

To be honest with you, these are just the meals I constantly make… but making a list of 10-12 solid rotational meals that can double up as leftover lunches is life-changing. I know you might think I’m being excessive to call a list of meals life-changing but honestly, the difference it makes to your overall wellbeing, health and bank account when you have planned your meals and have healthy things to eat in the house when you are busy is incredible.

If you’re anything like me you won’t be short for ideas of things you could do. In fact, perhaps that is part of the problem as to why you feel so busy and overwhelmed.

Now whenever I have a new project I want to explore, marketing channel I could try or, let’s be real, business idea — I add it to this list and I revisit it every three weeks. Then I have a recurring reminder in notion to check my projects list to see how I feel about them once the initial hyper-fixation has worn off.

Another thing I bet you’re good at — not celebrating your wins, being too self-deprecating and forgetting how good you actually are. Me too.

So this list is your reminder. In here I add screenshots of lovely messages, testimonials, results, numbers I’m proud of, problems I’ve solved, opportunities I’ve be offered, experiences I’ve had… I keep all the evidence.

10/10 recommend, not just for the inevitable day when you decide you’re a complete fraud, but because this is extraordinarily useful business intelligence. Your proof tells you what other people value about you.

When was the last time you wrote down all the ways you’ve ever made money?

I keep a running list of every income stream I’ve ever had, how much it has made me and some notes underneath of why it worked or didn’t and where people found me.

This list is surprisingly useful when you need a quick cashflow fix because you can look for patterns of what has worked before.

Because if you need £10,000 quickly, it’s much more likely to come from understanding what already works than finding another 37 things you could try.

We don’t all have the same 24hrs and we certainly all don’t have the same lever of agency over what we can do with those 24hrs. Shocker I know.

I’m a single parent with two young kids and a bunch of businesses to run. Which means aside from needing to be extraordinarily organised and leveraged up to the eyeballs, I have to weigh up the cost versus time of everything. Because you’d best believe I would rather get my groceries delivered and spend 2 hours riding bikes with my kids than taking them to a supermarket on a Saturday.

But if like me, you grew up with your parents (mum) doing everything then you are likely conditioned to try and do everything at work and at home because technically you can do it yourself.

Cleaning. Bookkeeping. Editing. Grocery delivery. Admin. Building landing pages. Ironing. Research…

So write down everything you are currently doing that could be outsourced and put a price beside each one. Then write out the benefit of what you get back if you outsource it.

You might discover that some of the things you’ve been tolerating are surprisingly cheap to remove from your life and the cost of outsourcing them is significantly outweighed by the upside in time or potential earnings.

This is less of a networking database and more a recurring list of people you genuinely like, admire, miss, want to work with, enjoyed working with or keep thinking, I really should message them.

Past clients, old colleagues, clever internet friends or someone you met at dinner six months ago. Keep the list and then keep in touch with them!

This is my favourite list. Again, I know you are shocked. This isn’t a set of realistic goals… this is a list of what you would do in the next 12 months if everything went ridiculously well.

Who would you work with? What would you stop doing? How much would you earn? Where would you go? What would your ordinary week day look like? What would you buy? What would you make? What would become possible?

We’re all very good at making lists in our heads of everything that could go wrong so it seems only fair to make one for the other possibility too and this time, to write it down.