Three Things to do Every Day

Brian Peterson
2 min readJan 27, 2023

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Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash
  1. Do a big thing. You have your projects, dreams, schemes, and ideas. They are taped to your wall and simmering in open browser tabs. You are the CEO of this venture, and that is the gift and the curse. You have so many other things going on, all the time, but this is one that you know you need to move forward. Do it. Spend some time on it every day. Make it a habit. Then don’t get complacent. Don’t just put in the time to put in the time. Make it count. Carve out more. As the vision gets clearer you will know when you need to make it half day on Saturday, or the full weekend, or a larger block of time daily. Soon come. It starts with committing every day, and honoring that commitment with the kind of energy that will make a real difference.
  2. Do a lingering thing. Address your clutter. Handle that quick repair. Organize something. Reach out to an old friend you’ve been meaning to contact. Read that article. Return that item. Check something off the list that’s been there for too long. Getting it to the list was a start. But now you have to actually DO IT. Pick something and get it done.
  3. Do something you don’t want to do. It happens around 3:30pm for me. There are emails left to send, admin functions to execute, check-ins to be done, or something else to properly close out the day. The problem is I don’t want to do any of it. Nothing. So I allow myself to get distracted by less critical emails and tasks and/or I stretch things out for no good reason. Don’t do that. You don’t do yourself any good by hating your daily task list at the end of the day. Try to optimize it, doing the critical things first and sticking to a schedule (and not overloading it in the first place if you can avoid it), but commit to doing those essential things at the end of the day. Hopefully they are simpler and more enjoyable. Or will cause more trouble than its worth if you put it off until tomorrow. Do at least one. Or put yourself on the clock for 30 minutes and see how many you can knock out. Get a good stretch and short walk in beforehand, refill your water, and then get it done.

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Brian Peterson
Brian Peterson

Written by Brian Peterson

I am a husband, father, writer, educator, and generator of ideas. Working on my follow through. Latest book, Higher Learning, out now at learnhigher.com.