 What on earth is a to-don't list and why do I think you should write one? That's what we're going to explore in today's episode. Let's dive straight in. Whilst I started life as a specialist in child and adolescent mental health, increasingly I find myself more and more concerned about and teaching about the well-being of the adults who care for and work with children and young people. And when thinking about self-care and emotional well-being and looking after our own mental health, one of the simple strategies that I often advocate is the writing of a to-don't list and I thought I would talk to you about that today because maybe this is something that you could try right away that might make a little bit of a difference to how things feel for you right now. So a to-don't list is just as it sounds. It's a list of things you're going to not do. Now the reason that this is helpful is because often one of the things that makes self-care really difficult for us is lack of time and one of the things that will feed into the low mood or anxiety that we might be experiencing, many of us do, is that feeling of overwhelm and just too many things to do. It's just a symptom of a living in the modern day. Many of us are totally overwhelmed. There are just far too many things to do and not enough time. So how do we fix that? We lose some of the things on our to-do list. And this can feel difficult at first because we feel like everything on that list is really, really important. But when we stop and we take a step back, there are often many things that we can put on that to-don't list. A good starting point to think about this from can be casting your mind back just for a moment to those early days of the pandemic when everything went a little bit odd for a while and we weren't able to do all of our normal things, just everything just kind of stopped, didn't it? And we had very little resource and very little capacity to do the normal things in the normal way. And we had to really hunker down and we could only continue to do the things that really, really mattered. We had to like properly prioritise and we found our day-to-day lives look really different than they normally did. And what's happened since then is as things have reverted to some kind of normal, though one hesitates to use that word. But, you know, things are a bit more like they were pre-pandemic now than they have been for a long time. And one of the things that's also happened is that our kind of day-to-day activities have returned somewhat to what they were before. We're probably doing many of the things that we used to do pre-pandemic. So that kind of hunkering down and prioritising and taking a very sort of essentialist type approach that we might have done in those early lockdown days is kind of gone for many of us. So what I'm suggesting today is we write at a don't list. We work out where can we carve some more space and time in our day-to-day life in order that we can better look after ourselves, free up a bit of mental capacity, build a tiny bit of space and just reduce the overwhelm a bit. So I'm going to share a few ideas for doing that and you'll have some of your own as well. But the basic concept is write a list of things you're going to not do. So the first one is meetings. So have a look at your regular diary. Many of us have got all sorts of meetings that recur that we go to often and thinking, really, do you really need to go to them? If you're the person who runs the meeting, chairs the meeting, do those meetings really need to happen? If they do need to happen, then thinking about the frequency with which they happen, the length of the meeting, because there's lots of very interesting evidence that meetings will always fill the amount of time allotted to them. So if instead of a 60 minute meeting, you have a 40 minute meeting, one can be quite sure that you will actually cover the business you intended to within that 40 minutes, even just shaving off a few minutes here and there can make a big difference here. So maybe you can change the length. Maybe you can think about, well, who really needs to be there? Do all of these people need to be invited? Because this might help with their two don't lists too. And instead, we might choose to have a smaller group of people making it quite clear that we're happy to share the outcomes from that meeting. And if people really want to come along, they can. But making it somewhat less compulsory when we have a smaller group of people, we often find that we can get more done more quickly. But then really questioning, do I need to be in that meeting? Does that meeting need to happen or could it happen for less time or less frequently, lots and lots of meetings and things that just happen really regularly like that just have happened that way for a long time. We've always had that meeting on a Tuesday and so we continue. But what happened when you didn't during the pandemic? Did the wheels all fall off or was it OK? And if the wheels did all fall off, then maybe you do need to keep having that meeting. But if it was OK, maybe you can do without that meeting. Maybe it's just one to consider. So start there. Start with the meetings. What could you lose or refine? Next is tasks. So any kind of like recurring tasks that you have things that you do every day, week, month, and that's the way you've always done them, whether this is at home or in your work, things that you do on a repeated basis, just make a list of them, whether that's physically or in your head and just think through. Are they actually adding value? Are they actually having impact? Why? Why are you doing them? Because a bit like the meetings, there are quite a lot of kind of repeated tasks that are done because that's what we've always done. And sometimes taking a step back and thinking, what is the impact of this? What is the product of this task? Why am I doing it? Is it actually adding value for anyone? Can help us think, maybe I don't really need to be doing it. Sometimes we are doing things because we've always done them that way, because this is something that we think is required. And sometimes we just then need to get a little bit kind of curious with the other people, perhaps that we're working with and saying, what are we actually doing with, for example, this data that we keep collecting? Is it having an impact? And if it is fantastic, but maybe we can think about how often we collect it or what we do with it. If there's any ways of doing this in a slightly easier way, if it's not being used or not having an impact, then just being like, do we need to keep doing it? Just be curious. It's not about being critical. It's just about being curious. Is this the best possible use of my time at home? We can think about these kinds of tasks, too. What are the regular tasks that happen in your home? Do you need to keep doing them quite as frequently as you do? If you change your bedding every five days, what happened? If you changed it every 10, for example, just beginning to get a bit curious about these things and not always continuing to do things in the same way because you've always done them that way, just getting curious. Is there anything we can drop off? Are there any things that you're doing that don't really need to be done? If suddenly you were robbed of a day a week because you had some new responsibility that came along that just superseded everything else, maybe someone got very sick and it's your day to be with them, to look after them, you had to find that extra day. What are the things that are least priority for you that you could drop? Can you drop those things anyway without the need for a sick friend or relative? Another really fruitful source of things to add to your to-don't list is your email inbox and any other inboxes you might have. I have reframed email in my mind as somebody else's to-do list. Everything that comes into your email inbox is something that somebody else wants you to do. And so that doesn't mean that those things don't need to be done. But our kind of set up of our brain and the dopamine hit we get or we get new messages and the way that that's quite a rewarding thing for us to be checking and checking and checking and we feel that need to immediately reply and immediately respond and that's almost become a kind of expectation. That's not helpful because it means other people's priorities are continuously going on our to-do list above our own. If instead we can be a bit more disciplined about how we feel about and respond to the things that enter our inboxes, then perhaps we can get our priorities a little bit straighter. Maybe we've got a really clear idea about what our priorities are today, this week, this month and maybe those things in our email inbox fit there somewhere but perhaps not right at the top. Maybe we need to make sure that we get done what matters to us most first before we engage with that. So I have an exercise that I do each day before I go to bed called do one thing. And the idea is so I'm quite time poor at the moment because I am home educating both my daughters now, which is wonderful and they're smiling again and this is all good. But it does mean I have rather less time than I had when I wasn't home educating my daughters. So I now say do one thing and each night before I go to bed, I write a post-it note. I'm a fan of a post-it note and I leave it on my desk for my early morning session, which is when I get all my work done before everyone else in the house wakes up and I leave myself the one thing I want to get done before everyone else wakes up, just one thing. Sometimes it's a big thing. Sometimes it's a small thing that I say to myself if I get that one thing done, then I've done enough and sometimes I'll go on to do more and that's great. But I'm going to forgive myself if I can get that one thing done, it's been a good day. And I do this every day and it really helps me and it gives me a sense of direction when I wake up. But that is my number one priority for the day. That priority comes before anything else. The fact I get up very early in the morning before people are on social media or using their email or picking up the phone and that kind of thing really helps with this. But saying to myself, I'm not going to engage with the outside world until that one thing is done. Really, really helps me. So my priority comes first every day and maybe you could do something similar to that for yourself, perhaps. You have your priority, you do it first before you engage with everyone else's to-dos. But also just being a bit cynical about those things that are coming in, those tasks that are other people's to-dos and just saying, does this need to go on my to-do list or can it, can it go on my to-don't list, maybe? Finally, in terms of taking things off of our to-do list and adding them to our to-don't list, I would like to advocate for positive delegation. Positive delegation is about having a task that does need to be done but recognizing that somebody else that we work with or live with may also be able to learn to do that task. That may require an investment of time and energy from us in the first instance to enable them to have the skills, support, access to things that they need to do that task. And it might require a learning of expectations from us in how that task may be done and to what standard. But when we do that, it not only adds something to our to-don't list and removes a task for us in the long term. At the beginning, we might end up doing it alongside or putting more input into support. In the long term, it takes it off of our to-do list, adds it to our to-don't list. But also it builds up the skills and the expertise and the self-esteem of the person who's taken on that responsibility. So a really simple example in our house would be that now that my daughters are home educating, part of their curriculum each week is that they each have a day on which they make the family meal for the evening. And actually they've grown to really enjoy doing this and we've had some really lovely meals. They weren't always lovely at the beginning and sometimes my daughters require more support in that endeavor, whether that comes from myself or my husband or my mother-in-law who also lives with us. That's just an example, I guess, of something that either myself or my husband were having to do every day. But as my daughters' skills increase and as their enjoyment of that activity actually increases, both they get a lot from it. It's actually quite an important part of their kind of life skills and self-development and they like it. And also it's something that we then don't have to do. It's a real win-win in the long term whilst we're maybe having to invest a little bit of our time, effort and energies in the short and the medium term and perhaps accepting that sometimes we'll be eating slightly differently than we might have otherwise. But do you know what that's okay too? It's good for us all to explore a little bit more. There'll be loads of examples like that within your kind of day-to-day life at home and at work and just thinking what tasks am I doing that I could positively delegate where with a bit of an investment from me now somebody else might really benefit from that responsibility and developing those skills. So here we go. So you're gonna create your two don'ts list. I hope you do. You're gonna take a look at your meetings. You're gonna see whether there are any of those that you can reduce the frequency or the length of or just lose them all together. You're gonna take a look at your regular tasks and be really honest with yourself and think, do these things actually all need to be done or can we drop them or reduce the frequency again? You're gonna take a look at your email through the cynical view of seeing it as someone else's to-do list and you're gonna think about how and when you prioritize those tasks or if indeed you can ditch them all together. And then finally, you're gonna think about whether you can positively delegate any of your regular tasks to someone else at home or at work. I really hope that some of those ideas were helpful. I would love to hear about your two don't list over socials. Do drop me a line and let me know if this is an idea you are up for embracing or you're gonna take the pookie challenge. If you would like to support my work, you can do so by sharing it. You can do so by heading over to Patreon and joining my little community there. Or you can do so by inviting me to speak at your next event or in your setting. Until next time, over and out.