Give That Woman a Gold Star!
No two weeks are the same when you are a parent, nor when you are a Solopreneur.
The juggle is real. So many coulda, woulda, shoulda’s and not as many didas as we would like ticked off right? And YES I totally just made up the word dida… as in that thing I actually got round to doing, that thing I actually did.
See this is the problem with to do lists… they are never ending, and they don’t take into account all of the other random crap that enters our working week that has to be triaged, managed, completed or ignored.
Often as mums in business we go into (or quite literally fall into) entrepreneurship under the guise of more freedom, more choice. We want to be able to work around our kids, not have an unsupportive boss breathing down our neck, but then before you know it we have become the worst type of boss, the one who doesn’t even notice what you have achieved from week to week, month to month….that just keeps piling on more shit to do.
Now I have been a Solopreneur for almost 30 years, 11 of which I have been a parent, 10 of which I have been a single parent, 3 of which felt like I was in some kind of apocalyptic zombie movie…it’s been a whole vibe.
But actually it was the pandemic that actually gave me the courage to find a productivity system that worked for me… and it was based on Gold Stars… like literal sticky foil stars which I awarded myself each week.
Don’t judge me.
In business (and in life) there are urgent, not urgent, important and not so important things we have to do… but when we are in the thick of it, no fancy quadrant to helps us figure out what is what, actually helps… why? Because we are often fuelled by adrenaline, cortisol and dopamine… without which we are quite literally we’d be left to our own devices with coffee or cocaine LOL
But back to the gold stars…
I figured out during 2020 when I was running 2 online businesses with thousands of clients while also trying to homeschool a 7 year old, and stop a ginger kitten from shitting behind the TV… that many of the tasks on my to do list made no difference at all to the success or solvency of my business.
In fact around 80% of what I was attempting to do, were things which I had collected and accumulated from experts and gurus who told me these were the things that mattered… when actually they were all just shite.
And so I grabbed some coloured pens and I started colour coding my list.
Shit, shit, shit, oooohhh ok I might have to actually do that one, shit, shit, shit, shit… oooohhh if only I had the time to actually do that one, I’d be a millionaire by now… shit, shit, shit.
You get the idea.
And so my Getting The Important Shit Done productivity system was born.
I got into the habit of colour coding my planner, my to do list, and later a digitised productivity tool, using the code.
Red – Shit List – Stuff I hated doing and didn’t seem to actually make much of a difference
Green – Hit List – Stuff that NEEDED to be done and could only be done by me
Gold – Gold list – Stuff that actually strategically grew my business
And here is where it gets juicy, I started allocating time in my working week to ONLY work on Gold List tasks… AND I could award myself a gold star, for any significant block of time I worked on it… NOT just when the task was completed, because delayed gratification doesn’t work for me… I need constant reward.
In 2020 I ended up having my most financially successful year in business, I made over a quarter of a million pound in revenue, wrote a book, served more than 3000 paying clients, and all from the corner of my 2 bed apartment in East London…with the cat still shitting behind the TV.
We can’t do it all ladies, we just can’t…I apply the Gold Star principle to my parenting too…so much of our adulting goes unnoticed, unrewarded, and it wears us down…combine that with the million things which need doing in our businesses and it’s no wonder so many mumpreneurs burn out.
So next time you spend an hour on that super challenging but significant to your business growth task, instead of faffing about on socials, or procrasta-branding in Canva, give yourself a gold star and see how it changes how you feel about yourself.
Aim for a 5 star week and see how your business changes.