How to make progress in life

There’s a certain magic to sitting down with a pen, paper, and your thoughts.

To make progress in any area of my life, I've relied on this exact method: a pen, paper, and five critical tasks for the day.

Also known as the Power List, this method, which I owe to Andy Frisella (credit to him in EP16 of his podcast), has been a game changer. It has taken me from struggling to complete daily tasks and feeling overwhelmed while starting my agency, to achieving my dreams within just six months.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about how you can use this method to generate progress in all areas of your life. Whether you’re starting an agency, training for a marathon, or running an established business, this will help you.

Before you start writing out five critical tasks, you need to establish your goals and be crystal clear on where you want to be. This clarity allows you to reverse engineer the steps needed, breaking them down into monthly, weekly, and eventually daily tasks that will get you to your desired goal.

Let me introduce you to a resource I found in a Charlie Morgan video called the War Map. This allows you to visualize your entire year on one spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like on a macro and micro scale with each month.

You can find my full video explaining how to use this War Map paired with the Power List here - https://youtu.be/9_MDMk3SHV4

Here’s how I’d use this as an example, without giving real figures:

Set a goal for Q4 of reaching £7.5k revenue for that quarter.

To achieve this, I need to send out 500 emails per month, which will allow me to book 50 appointments. With a close rate of 10%, I’ll be able to close 5 clients at £500 each for a service I’m offering.

£500 x 5 = £2500 x 3 months = £7500 revenue generated.

Knowing that my goal is £7500 and that I book 10% of all emails sent and close 10% of all calls taken, I can now put steps in place before starting Q4, such as:

- Researching email campaign tools/software

- Scraping leads

- Setting up new email inboxes

- Developing scripts and testing angles

- Creating lead magnets, VSLs, and landing pages

These tasks will then be allocated weekly to be completed before launching the email campaign that will book appointments on autopilot. Of course, this process would look different if doing outreach manually and most of your critical tasks would be the mundane sitting down and doing outreach for 2-3hrs if not more per day but that’s what gets results.

For example, it might take me a week to complete a VSL. This would involve:

- A day of research (a few hours)

- A day of scripting (a few hours)

- Creating slide presentations (a few hours)

- Two days of recording (4-hour sessions each)

- Two days of editing (2-hour sessions each)

These would become daily critical tasks on the Power List.

Another example is weight loss.

Suppose I’m going on holiday at the end of May and want to lose 12kg. I know that losing 1kg per week will take 12 weeks. To achieve this, I need to lose 4kg per month, broken down into 1kg per week. Daily critical tasks might include:

- 30 minutes of cardio

- 10,000 steps per day

- Consuming 2000 calories (a calorie deficit for my body weight and height)

As the weeks go by, if my weight loss rate is below 1kg per week, I’ll need to increase my activity level while slightly decreasing food intake, constantly monitoring my weight.

Breaking down these goals into critical tasks ensures daily progress. This isn’t a to-do list with items like:

- Eat 2000 calories

- Walk 10,000 steps

- Do 30 minutes of cardio

- Take out the rubbish

- Read a book

- Watch a YouTube video about diet

- Buy food for next week

Instead, it’s about having a goal and breaking it down into critical tasks that move you closer to it. On a micro scale, progress may seem small, but on a macro scale, it’s significant.

Hopefully, this explains the concept well. Combining these methods can make you incredibly productive and help you make tremendous progress in a year.

You can use the war map to clearly visualise your macro goals whilst tracking them on a micro level within each month but i’d recommend using the Power List for the micro level pen and paper method as it’s just much more powerful in my opinion. Only then once completed I put in power list data every couple of days or so into the war map.

You can download a blank War Map here.

Thanks,

Konrad