How To Tackle The Oldest Item On Your To-Do List

Which is more difficult: creating an effective “elevator pitch”, or writing a one-page summary of what you do?

Until this week, I’d have sworn it was the elevator pitch. After all, great writing isn’t about what you put in, it’s about what you leave out (thanks to Andy Smith for reminding me of this recently).

I’ve had several goes at writing and re-writing mine this year. It hasn’t been easy. As someone who loves doing lots of things, it was torture to narrow it down to say, “This, not that, is what I do”.

But now, it’s starting to feel quite cool. “I’m a virtual collaborationist. I help people who work apart to work better together, by training and coaching virtual leaders and their teams. It turns out that the biggest challenges in virtual teams aren’t about the technology, they’re about the people. Do you work remotely at the moment? How’s it working for you?”

Then, last week, Mark Mercer helpfully asked me, during a phone conversation, to provide a one-page summary of what I do, so that he could share it.

And I realised that the task “Write a one-pager” had been sitting on my to-do list for about six months. It had looked like an innocuous little list item, to be knocked off some time when I had a spare hour. But spare hours had come and gone: spare the-best-part-of-a-days had come and gone. And the list item remained.

I looked more closely. It was, in fact, the oldest item on my to-do list. I was surprised – I’m not normally a procrastinator.

And, scarily, the item had actually appeared there because it had been requested by a potential client. I’d done a phone call instead that time… but then it had been requested by someone else. Had I been missing out on paying work because I couldn’t get round to writing a page of copy?!?

Shaken, I did something I often find difficult: I asked for help. “Mark,” I said, “What do you think should be in a one-pager?”

Within a couple of minutes, he had suggested a structure. Within an hour, the job was off the list.

And later that day, the one-pager was on its way to a potential client.

What was it about the situation that helped me tackle the oldest item on my to-do list?

• There was a real human being asking for it to be done. Not a faceless corporation, but an actual person – in this case, Mark.

• Getting it done would be useful. Not just to me (WIIFM hadn’t worked all these months), but to people who would find it valuable to learn what I had to teach.

• I had a structure to kick against, rather than a blank piece of paper.

• I was willing to allow the finished item to be imperfect. Of course the one-pager could probably bear a bit more polish: that’s the nature of these things. But the polishing effect comes from getting it out there to rub against other people.

It’s been useful for me to review what helped me to get this done – I suspect it’ll help me tackle other ancient tasks. I notice that, for me, it’s not about setting goals/targets/outcomes, but it is about feeling that the task is doable and useful.

And that piece about having a structure to kick against? There’s a whole load of richness there to explore: I’m connecting it with the structures I use in coaching and in my work with teams, an how people find those helpful.

• Want to get yourself motivated? My friend Peter Urey has created a new self-coaching course, based on Clean Language, that can help. Click this link to get it half price.