562: Give Yourself a Deadline
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Are you constantly juggling tasks and struggling to get everything done? In this episode, Collin and Meghan discuss the power of setting deadlines and working in focused time blocks to tackle endless to-do lists. They share how short, intentional intervals can improve decision-making, preserve energy, and increase productivity. Whether you’re managing hires, tackling admin tasks, or balancing work-life demands, this episode offers practical tools to help you get more done without burning out.
Main topics:
Setting time limits
Prioritizing tasks effectively
Managing decision fatigue
Balancing flexibility and focus
Practicing trial and error
Maint takeaway: "Not every decision deserves the same amount of time in your day."
In this episode, we share how setting deadlines and using short, focused time blocks can transform your productivity and decision-making. By breaking tasks into manageable chunks, you can preserve your energy, reduce decision fatigue, and stay focused on what matters most. We also discuss the importance of triaging tasks, making intentional progress on big projects, and why not every decision deserves the same amount of your time. Tune in to learn practical strategies for reclaiming control of your day without sacrificing quality.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
562
Sun, Jan 19, 2025 3:22PM • 21:18
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Time management, task prioritization, deadlines, admin tasks, decision making, time blocks, focus, productivity, work-life balance, to-do list, time limits, energy preservation, decision fatigue, task completion, flexibility.
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin, and we are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you joining us today and listening to this. Also. We'd like to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon people for supporting today's show. They have found value in some of the episodes that we've done, learned some lessons, got some takeaways, and they want to give a few dollars back of their hard earned money every month. If that sounds like you too, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all the ways that you can help out. I also wanted to mention that a lot of times we'll on social media, on Facebook and Instagram, will post the links to our website to go and listen. You can listen to any of our episodes on our website, but you don't have to wait until we post them on social media in order to listen to them. If you go to Apple podcasts or Spotify, you can follow us there, and anytime we release a new episode, it'll automatically pop up in your queue, and you can start listening then. And
Collin 00:49
because you're gonna love the episode so much, you can even turn on notifications, so the app will let you know as soon as a new episode comes out. That's a great idea.
Meghan 00:58
There seems to be an ever growing list of demands on our time, things to do things to put on a list that we need to do, things to check off, just admin tasks, field tasks, and then, oh yeah, there's our personal life on the other side of all of the other tasks as well. And I feel like whenever Collin and I sit down to discuss something, a lot of times, because we are in business together and we like each other, we can sit down and maybe have a list of 10 things, but we'll only get through the first one or two, and it'll take us two hours to get through that, because we just sit there and we feed off of each other and go back and forth. And sometimes we spiral into negativity, if it's not such a great topic, but something that we've really been working on lately is giving ourselves a deadline, a time limit of when we need to do things. Our time is so precious, and we never get it back, and because the to do list seems to be never ending, we really need to prioritize and triage tasks and give ourselves okay, I'm gonna set aside this time to do this task in order to make the most of the time that we have. It really
Collin 01:52
is about making the most out of our time and our day. With so many things going on, it's easy to kind of fall down a rabbit hole or get stuck on one thing in particular, and when we do that, we end up delaying a lot of the other decisions that are on our plate, or we end up not being able to move through things that really shouldn't take us that much time. And I think that's really one of I know my personal my biggest frustrations when I get stuck on things is going I have 1000 other things that I need to decide, and I know that, Oh, those are only going to take a few minutes to get to. But the thing I'm working on right now is really just sucking up so much of my time, my energy, my focus, that by the time I get to those smaller things, I end up being really tired, and then I rush through those, or don't make a good decision on those at all. So this process of saying I'm only going to spend 15 minutes working on whatever this is so that I can chunk through more things really helps preserve the energy and your decision making processes to get through everything that you need to. Because what typically happens in our day is because of everything going on in our lives. Megan and I have between 7pm and 9pm to really talk business and to dig deep into a lot of the decisions that we have put off during the day, or have, you know, been waiting on for the previous day. So a great example of this is actually hires. We have a lot of people responding to our hires. We're working through our funnel and our processes, but we typically wait to make a decision on one particular hire versus another when, for when we're together, so that we can both give input on this and give insight on the person in their answers. So we have to wait till seven o'clock. But in order to get through the other 100 things that have also come up throughout the rest of the day, we sit down and we go, okay, we've got we're going to start talking about hires, but we're only going to do that for about 15 minutes before we need to move on to the next thing on our list, because otherwise we could spend the next two hours talking about nothing but the hires, and reminiscing about the old hires, or thinking about what we need to do in the future, or in spiraling and kind of moving, not having the conversation move in A good direction for us and becoming really disorganized. And we
Meghan 04:03
definitely have done that, and don't recommend doing that. But yeah, because our time is limited, and with the to do list is so long, we only have a certain amount of time to work on each thing, otherwise we have to delay it till the next day, and sometimes that's not an option well. And what
Collin 04:15
this also helps is this helps large projects or large initiatives that we are working on. It helps continue to move them forward just a little bit. If we go, okay, hiring is a never ending process. It will take up all of our time every day if we allow it. Entire companies are based around nothing but hiring that's not us. So we have to go, here's 15 minutes to pull people through our process, and then tomorrow we're going to give another 15 or 30 minutes and pull them through the process. But that also means that we go, okay, for the next 15 minutes we need to talk about our website ad copy, or the next 15 minutes we're going to start talking about our lead magnet on our website, and then the next 15 minutes, basically what we're doing is we're setting a meeting for ourselves and setting an agenda for what we're going to talk about and the time limits of which we're going to talk. About it. And importantly, here do we get through every aspect of what we need to talk about for a particular topic, very rarely and unless it's a very short topic, so we have to take down notes and understand where we are and what's where we left off and what decisions we didn't get to. So the next time, we can come back to them. But also maybe we get through the end of what we had to talk about, we get through all of our lists and we still have some extra time. Well, guess what you do that point, you circle back around to the beginning, and you start working from your list from top to bottom again, meaning that you can continue this cycle of working through your list little by little, taking smaller and smaller chunks. This really helps us, prevent us from getting sidetracked or getting bogged down in one particular thing. Because, again, what we don't want to do is we only have seven to nine o'clock at night. We don't want to reach 855 and still have the rest of our list to hurry and rush through and be angry and frustrated and end the day like that well. And
Meghan 05:56
that's a really good point, that if there are large projects that we need to make a big decision on or it's going to take us a lot of time, and there's a lot of moving pieces within a project. That doesn't mean that we just rush through it and say, Okay, well, this is really big, but I'm gonna give it the same amount of time as I would a really simple thing. No, we do have to kind of triage things of, okay, this does have to get done tomorrow, and it's a really big thing, so maybe hires do have to wait until tomorrow in order to talk about it then. And
Collin 06:22
so what it takes to get to this point is when you have time is to first have time set aside to work on these kind of projects and these decision making. This is your admin time. These are your office hours. And you can have one hour a day. You can have five hours a day, however much time you can dedicate to this kind of thing. Go for it. But then, importantly, you have to show up to that time prepared. Pretend you're holding a meeting with yourself. I used to run meetings for actually, for a state agency in my previous line of work, and you had to show up with an outline, with a summary of what was going to happen, with objectives for that meeting, and basically homework for everybody, for when they left, of what they were supposed to do. And this means we have to do that for ourselves. We have to show up prepared with our list, with our itinerary, of all of our task lists that we have to get through that day. What are the big decisions that we're waiting on? What are the big data points that we're trying to gather and work through in the projects that we're having to work on? Show up with that list, so that whenever that timer starts, whenever that meeting starts with yourself, you can start working on this. And I love the idea of setting that timer, especially when you're just getting started with this. Set a 15 minute timer. Set a 20 minute timer, and as soon as that's done, you stop what you're doing. You push that off to the side, and you move to the next agenda item. You write notes of where you left off so that you know, okay, I'm gonna come back to this, but I've got to move on to this next thing, because my time is important. If you had 100 people in that room waiting for you to have this meeting with you would want to respect their time and make sure that you got talking points and you got things worked through
Meghan 07:59
well. And at first you're not going to know how many minutes it's going to take for you to gather all of your tax documents for the last year. So, yeah, just set an arbitrary 1520 minutes, see how much you can get through, and then you'll know for next time. Okay, this generally took me this amount of time, so I know what I need to do next time. Yeah, or
Collin 08:16
you just keep the same timer going and you keep coming back to it and cycling through it in little chunks. If you're like me, setting a one hour timer is going to be way too long for any task. I get way too distracted. I need to get up and walk around. I need to move. I need to go distract myself with something before that one hour timer has hit. And so keeping these short focused 15 minute 20 minute intervals allows you to stay focused in that time. And yeah, then you know, okay, well, actually, I'm coming up with tax prep. A 15 minute timer is not going to get me anywhere. And importantly, here, you're right, Megan, we do have to understand the tasks that we're getting into. Maybe you're going to get into a task that, if you stopped in the middle of it would actually be really detrimental. Maybe you can't save in a document, or maybe you can't end a meeting in 15 minutes, and you so you do have to know, I need to budget a little bit more time for this, but after a while and a little bit of practice, you do get the hang of that and know what you can assign to yourself and how much time that's going to take. A task that you should
Meghan 09:14
remember every year is renewing your pet sitters insurance. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their prairie family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you, and get a free quote at pets@llc.com you can get a discount when you join by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to check out, check out the benefits of membership and insurance. Once again at pets@llc.com I really don't like forgetting things, but what I don't like even more is tasks taking up bandwidth in my brain, and I can't fully focus on other things because I'm trying to remember the 20 things that I have. Swirling around. So what I love to do is write them down in a note so as things pop up during the day of oh, this is really important email, we can't forget to respond to this today. Or this is something that Collin and I need to talk about, and we need to move really fast. I write it down in my notes app, and then that frees up my brain to go, okay, it is written down in a place it's not going to be forgotten, because it's where all of my other notes are for the day, and then at the end of the day, Collin and I can sit down and we can chunk through it as best we can, but I know that it's not going to be forgotten. Yeah,
Collin 10:27
and you're not carrying around that mental burden throughout the rest of the day, right? You're not having it overshadow and kind of take up that bandwidth where you're stressing out and you're not able to perform other things or enjoy other time because you're worried about forgetting the thing that you have to work on. And so this end of day thing that Meg and I have have kind of fallen into slash, been forced into, given everything else going on our lives, of going at the end of the day, that's whenever we sit down and work through stuff, that's actually a great way to do it, even if you're solo, of going, I'm going to do my end of day review and breakdown for what happened today. And in this technique of setting these short intervals to work within a larger context is actually a slight variation off of what's called the block schedule, where you say for one hour on Tuesdays, that's whenever I'm going to do these specific tasks or and you can actually go through and just time block your entire day to say what you're going to be working on. Unfortunately, not all of us have the luxury to do that, because we run small businesses, and we end up having a lot of variation and fluctuation and variability in our days, where we can't really predict or really control where our time goes, but what we can do is go, Okay, I have the next hour to work on something, so I'm going to pull up that list. I'm going to quickly then do a prioritization of these and rank them top to bottom, so I know what I need to work on in this short amount of time, and can see how far I can get through this list before my time is done and I have to go on to the next thing. Now,
Meghan 11:51
neither of us are really evening people. I feel like we're more morning people. But again, the stage of life that we're in right now. This is the time that we have to work on stuff. Maybe you're listening and you're saying, Oh, I'm more of a morning person. Well, great. Do your list in the morning, and then you have the rest of the day to focus on other things you know yourself best and your priorities and how your life works. So find the time that's going to be best for you. And it may not look the same every day. You may need to switch it up based on your other activities, but because
Collin 12:17
we, a, have that list and B, we are going to have a little bit of time in our day. As soon as we sit down, we pull out that list, we work through in our short time blocks to make sure that we can get through as many of those things as we can. And then you just pick up and move on. And we know I'm going to be able to come back to this later. And it is that piece that it gives us throughout the rest of the day of going, Okay, I didn't get through everything, but there's going to be time, either later today or tomorrow, where I'm going to pick that list back up. And here's the other beauty of setting a deadline for yourself and setting a time limit, it's going to help you from over editing yourself or limiting yourself. It's going to add a little bit of external pressure to your decisions to make that time crunch a reality, to go I've got to work on this and get it done, because the timer is ticking away. And some of us really do need that little external motivation to not sit on that social media post for hours and hours and hours instead make it the best we can. And then when that 15 minute timers go off, hit post and we've got to move on to the next thing, because we can't just sit there and stew over that thing. There are so many decisions that we have to make. We just
13:23
don't have that luxury. I feel like you were speaking to me. Now I'm speaking to
Collin 13:27
me when it comes to editing the website
Meghan 13:31
well, but we can all have a little bit of anxiety about that of, oh, it's done, but it's not perfect, but that's when you just have to do the thing. But it's that mentality of Done is better than perfect now
Collin 13:41
without the extra wasted time and energy revolving around that particular decision. Now, again, this this system works both with small decisions and big decisions, because we're never going to make a big decision in just our little 115 minute time block. It may take us 15 of those little time blocks in order to work through that decision entirely. So we're giving its due diligence, but we're also not over allocating our energy and resources to eat to small decisions so that they eat up all of our time. A great thing like this can be okay. I just got an email back from a potential hire who kind of ran me up one side and down the other because they didn't like that. We rejected them. Well, I can certainly, I am really good at sitting and stewing on bad news like that for hours and hours and hours, but when we are processing our hires and we're working through emails, I only have 15 minutes, because I know the next thing on our list, the next thing on our agenda may be, you know, doing an event later in the spring, or it may be making sure that we have enough resources or enough poop bags coming up, and we've got to do an allocation of those. So we just move through these things, and it helps us process them a little bit faster when we've got that timer ticking down. But as
Meghan 14:49
a completionist, this can be hard, because I do want to get the task list done every single day. It's all important, and it all needs to get done right now, which is obviously not true, but that's something that I believe. Leave. But over the years, I've had to learn to let go of some things that it really is okay if I don't post a social media post tomorrow, it is not the end of the world. Probably nobody is even going to notice. Or it's okay if we didn't respond to the hire today because we were busy with our kids or doing something for the business that was super important, and it just didn't get done, it can be hard to balance those two things, of wanting to get everything done, but also recognizing that sometimes it's not healthy. Sometimes sleep is more important than responding to every single email and having a clear inbox. Let's say that even
Collin 15:32
if you don't set a timer, just knowing that you have committed at least at some level to get through as much as you can in a certain amount of time. It does add a sense of urgency to you, which does something really important. It helps you focus. It helps you know, okay, I only gave myself 15 minutes to work through hires, and I might not get through all of them, but it also means that when that Instagram notification pops up and it's somebody commenting on my post. I'm not going to click on that, because that's time taken away from this task that I've deemed valuable to me and that I have to do because I've set this time limit. And yes, do we sit? Do we stick to a strict 15 minute timer? And the time goes off and, you know, the lights shut out and the gates bar? No, it's not that extreme, but it's just a little bit of urgency that we try and place on ourselves to go this is so important, and yes, we need to get to sleep eventually. So we've got to work through these things. So it's a reminder to us more than anything, and let it be a reminder to you more than anything. Of I need to block out my distractions, because if I truly only had 15 minutes to work on this project, what would I do to ensure that I got it done and that I did it well, that I wasn't just rushing through I'd silence everything, I'd turn off my phone, I'd lock myself in a room and really look at this intently and in a very deep way, instead of just usually the surface and usually distracted by 1517, 1000 different things going on in the day, I'm gonna strip all that away so that I can make the most of this time. It's about elevating that time to a degree of importance that we typically don't in our day
Meghan 17:15
well, and obviously that's why our phones have a Do Not Disturb setting on them. So do our computers. It's almost like the software engineers knew what we needed. Hey, or maybe you have people in the field and you aren't able to silence your phone. Or if a client calls and you want to be able to answer it right away, which
Collin 17:30
is exactly why we like this method, instead of the time blocking, where we say this next hour is only emails. What do you do whenever a client calls, you're not going to say, well, I can't answer this client call because they're not calling during my client call hour. This is my email hour. Don't they know that? No, we only have a short amount of time to do admin work, and so whenever we dedicate a short amount of time for each individual task, it means that when an outside interruption takes place, when you get that phone call when a staff member calls you within an emergency at that client's house, you can feel free to stop, take that address that and then go back into that task list and set that timer again. It really does help you focus, and allows a lot more flexibility, because while we like to think that we control our day and that we have everything in a certain order, and we have it at our whim. As business owners and entrepreneurs, we really don't, especially in a service industry where we don't quite know what's going to happen next, even with field managers or office managers or anybody else in between us and our other employees, things are going to come up where they have to. We have to engage, and we have to act. And by shortening the amount of time where our attention is dedicated on one particular thing, it means that we can actually rapidly move through things and adapt as we need to and as our priorities change,
Meghan 18:52
which is why, if you're thinking about adopting this to start small little chunks, we always say, Don't eat the whole elephant in one bite. Take small bites of it, choose something that has low stakes to practice with this just a simple list of a couple things and a small chunk, maybe 15, maybe 30 minutes, and do 10 minutes per task and see where you get again. It's kind of gonna be a trial and error of I think it's gonna take me this long, but how long does it actually take me? And then as you progress, as you move through the months and the years of doing this, then you'll be able to know how long things take. And
Collin 19:23
this will especially be helpful whenever you have a lot of decisions to make, whether it is to hire or not hire or sponsor thing or not sponsor the thing. When you set hard, concrete time limits and deadlines for yourself for decision, it makes you make them with clear with clarity. It pulls everything into sharp focus, and you really take a seriousness to it than you normally wouldn't. And you are going to have times where you're going to second guess yourself. You are going to have times where you're going to go, man, I made that, but was that the right thing? It's a lot of trial and error, and that's the beauty of what we get to do. We get to try things and work through them, but I promise you that what's actually going to happen is. Confidence is going to go through the roof. You're actually going to trust yourself more and more to make good decisions, instead of sitting on them for hours and hours for days and days of inactivity and inaction in your business. But
Meghan 20:13
again, we're not moving fast and breaking stuff here. We're not trying to mess things up in our business. We're not trying to have spelling errors in our documents and just hire anybody who's breathing. We're trying to do focused time that is intentional with our tasks so we can make wise choices in a more realistic time frame, because not every decision deserves the same amount of time in your day, one social media post and changing your entire website home page does not need to take the same amount of time. We would love to know how you work through your task list. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, we appreciate you listening today. Hopefully this has been helpful, and if this approach doesn't work for you, that's okay too. We know everybody works differently. We'd like to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon people for sponsoring today's show, and we will talk with you next time bye. You.
