The ‘stop doing’ list

Our ‘to do’ lists are by turn our saviour and our nemesis. On busy days, they help keep us on track so the things we have to do don’t fall through the sieve that so often stands in for our brains. On days when we want to kick back and contemplate our navels for a bit, they are a rude reminder of everything we are pushing to one side.

I have a love/hate relationship with my ‘to do’ list. For years I didn’t even have one, my mind seemed to take care of keeping details neatly organised for me, but as the story goes I got older and that didn’t work quite so well anymore. So lists and tick boxes became a part of my life. Then one day while working on a project, I read an article called “pulling the plug” by author Jim Collins. In it he says:

“Creating a great company requires immense amounts of doing. Yet all that doing diverts us from an equally important and powerful aspect of making progress: deciding what to stop doing.”

I had become so programmed to think about all the things I should be doing that it had never occurred to me that there were things I should stop doing. Not because they were done or out-dated, but because they were in the way, stealing time from my day that I could be using in other, better ways.

Seemed like a bit of a radical idea. The stop doing list.

So today, as well as my to do list (and daily fish oil), I have a stop doing item on my list. Sometimes they are quite small, personal and seemingly insignificant – stop getting distracted by email. But just as often they are pretty major – stop flying back and forth to the US and focus on your business here in Australia for 12 months.

What does the idea of ‘stop doing’ have to do with your brand? Like everything in our businesses and our lives, it’s part of an interconnected system. So if there are things you should stop doing, chances are they are having an impact on your brand as much as any parts of your organisation.

In fact the stop doing might be: “stop looking at my brand as just a marketing initiative”. When you reframe your brand as a central organising principle that impacts all aspects of your organisation then a whole new world of things to do will open up… but then your to do list was starting to feel neglected anyway – right?

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognise who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.