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Rukruchi Babbage
Welcome to Design youn Strongest year ever, a 26 day special edition of the nonprofit Mastermind podcast. I'm your host, Rukruchi Babbage. I created this series because I believe that how your year ends is determined by what you do now in August, not in November. My work is rooted in the idea that intentional design, not more hustle, is what determines how far your mission can scale. So every day I'll share one very simple but very powerful lesson shift, or tool you can use right now to prepare yourself for year end and for each one. If you sign up for the emails that go with these episodes, I've created a worksheet or prompt. You can collect them as you go and have a whole bundle. Finally, if the day's topic hits a nerve, I'll point you towards the most relevant of my implementation toolkits. For the length of this series, I'm offering 26% off all purchases. Let's dive in. One of the most powerful things you can do is looking ahead to the next quarter is ruthlessly evaluate what matters and what doesn't. And I use the word ruthlessly on purpose. You want to identify the things in your calendar and on your task list that should not be there. Not necessarily the things you want to get rid of, not necessarily the things that are comfortable to get rid of. But be surgical about what should not be there. Because when you treat everything like it's equally important, everything feels essential and nothing gets done. Well, one of the leaders in my Next level nonprofit program told me that she had 14 open projects and she didn't feel that she could say no because everything felt mission aligned. That was the lens that she was using. But impact doesn't come from mission alignment alone. That's what I told her. Mission alignment is necessary, but cannot be the only filter. True impact comes from actually getting the right things done. It comes from finished execution. This is what I call impact drift, when your time and energy get pulled towards shiny tasks that aren't actually moving the mission forward. So here's today's micro shift. I want you to ask yourself, if I had to cut 30% of my work in the next two weeks, what would I cut? Now? You're not looking for the obvious. Time sucks. This is actually the hard part. It's not complicated, but it can be emotionally hard for people. So I'm going to really encourage you. Maybe like set aside some time to do it, like 10, 15 minutes. And like really focus what you're actually looking for here are things that look like good ideas that feel urgent to other people, perhaps people on your team, and honestly, even some things you may enjoy doing, but things that are actually stealing time from more important priorities. So if you had to cut 30% of your work, which of those kinds of things would get cut? Now, cutting is hard because it requires letting go often of good ideas of work that is actually meaningful. So the key here is to think about things that are less impactful than the work you're keeping, right? The lens is not is it mission aligned? That's not the only lens. It's of the mission aligned work that I could be doing. What is at the top of the list in terms of its potential impact and what is below the top of the list. And sometimes you have to cut things that are not at the top of the list. And if you accept the premise that you can't accomplish everything, then these are the choices you need to make. If you start building the muscle of discernment now, as the crazy part of your calendar, like year end for example, ramps up, you won't be buried under things that don't move the needle. You've done the hard work in advance. Now if you've signed up for the emails that go along with this series, I give you a great decision making filter, a tool that I use inside my coaching program. It's my Impact versus Noise matrix. It's just to jumpstart your thinking on how to get sharp about what matters most. You can grab that@brookrajibabbage.com ABC strategies and if you and your team want a step by step agenda driven toolkit for actually zeroing in on the exact right things to focus on and work on in the coming quarters, you can grab my Post IT Planning toolkit. It is a fantastic planning tool. I go through it every quarter and it's really, really helpful in filtering what to focus on. And you can grab that@brokeragebabbage.com backslash host it planning. I'll see you back here tomorrow for letter F.