This week, I'm sharing a sneak peek from Doing it All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You're Meant to Be, Chapter 3.

"I’M STUCK IN THE MIDDLE SEAT of a crowded Alaska Airlines flight, headphones in, Beyoncé’s

Lemonade blaring in both AirPods, a lukewarm coffee on the tray table. I’m completely in the zone—focused, caffeinated, and ready to do my best, most productive work. There’s something about purposefully confining myself to a familiar space in familiar clothes with a familiar soundtrack in my ears that tells my brain it’s get-shit-done time.

It’s not just the lack of distractions that sets me free to do deep work. The airline industry has ensured over the past ten years that even the most dedicated solitude- seeking entrepreneur could stay connected with cheap wireless Internet and messaging access in-flight. If I wanted to spend the entire trip sending Bitmojis to my kids and pinging my Modern Mommy Doc team, I could. But I don’t. Because it’s here, in this space—confined, right foot falling asleep, planning my one trip to the bathroom based on my seatmate’s nap schedule—that my brain always knows what to do.

Working on a plane is a habit for me. This is a place where I’ve practiced working, like the bustling coffee shops where I spent hours and hours studying to pass my medical school and pediatrics board certification exams. On an airplane, my mind is conditioned to settle in and pay attention as soon as I stow my jacket and buckle my seatbelt, “Freedom” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself” drowning out the rest of the world for the next five hours. When I need to get to all the tasks I can’t escape as the CEO of my small company, like writing thought pieces or budgeting for the year, up above the clouds in a 747 is my favorite place to be.

We all have tasks on our to-do list that we have to do—some that we don’t mind doing and some that we can’t stand (budgeting, I’m looking at you).

In an ideal world, we would delegate or stop doing these tasks. Unfortunately, we can’t because (a) there’s really no one else to do them; (b) it would cost too much money; or (c) the oversight doesn’t feel worth the time investment. These are the Non- Negotiables: the tasks in your life that are yours and yours alone, for whatever reason. For a manager in a corporate setting, they might include writing emails or completing performance reviews. For a sales associate at a retail store, they might be performing inventory at closing time or organizing merchandise. At home, the Non-Negotiables are tasks like laundry, dishes, making lunches, or prepping dinner, depending on how you divide chores with others in your family or parenting village. Don’t worry—not everything will be yours to do in this model. In the next chapter, we’ll explore the Swappables: tasks you need to automate or delegate to others so you have less on your plate in general.

To deal with the Non-Negotiables, you have to create systems and rely on smart organizational tools that make it easier for you to accomplish the tasks, the Non-Negotiables are all about efficiency and productivity. “Harder, better, faster, stronger”—that’s the way to attack this corner of the Centered Life Blueprint. 

I honed my organization and energy conservation skills by necessity, knowing that the stress of keeping countless patients alive and meeting my attending physicians’ expectations during my medical training required it. You learn how to follow a strict set of algorithms that ensure accuracy and speed when you’re checking the ventilation settings and vital signs of a dying infant in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit every four hours. One look on a worried parent’s face assures you that making an urgent phone call to a specialist deserves more time and attention than a pile of paperwork and emails. “Never let a decision that can wait stand in the way of a decision that can kill someone,” a mentor once taught me when I started out in private practice. Those are wise words I’ll never forget and that have profoundly influenced how I manage less important forks in the time management road, as a healthcare professional, as a mom, and as a business owner. But you shouldn’t have to find yourself in a life-and-death scenario to learn how to make the most of your time. That’s what this chapter is for.

The Non-Negotiables look different for everyone depending on their professional and personal circumstances.

Some of the Non-Negotiables in your friend’s life may not be the Non-Negotiables in yours. But no matter what they look like, we all have things on our plates that we’re stuck with, no matter how hard we wish them away. In my home, my husband does the dishes and I take the kids to school. My kids clean their bedrooms, but I clean the bathrooms. At work, my medical assistant rooms the patients, but I have to document their visits.

Laundry was on my client Carmen’s Non-Negotiables list. For a long time, it felt like it literally ran her life. Daily tasks like scrubbing dishes, sanitizing bathrooms, and picking up toys were also on her list. They used to take up the majority of her waking hours with her children. Even if she wasn’t actively performing all her endless household chores, they were still on her mind as she drove to her job at Walmart, to her night classes at the local community college after work, and back home again. So were things like paying her gas bill, getting her dog groomed, and planning her next vacation. Carmen’s to-do list was a mile long, and during times she could have been mentally present with her kids, her mind was usually elsewhere.

That kind of day in, day out mental load takes a toll, especially when family chores and responsibilities are not the only things weighing you down. For the first four years of her motherhood journey, she did it all, and looked good doing it from the outside. On the inside, she was a ball of stress—perpetually tired, always on the verge of snapping, and quite frankly, hardly ever mindful. In order to care for what she really cared about more effectively, she had to decide that the minute tasks of her daily schedule were less important than her Center Points. She had to learn how to put everything in its place, including the laundry. 

Tackling the Non-Negotiables

The key to making the Non-Negotiables less overwhelming and time-consuming for Carmen—and for anyone else who feels like revolving daily tasks are at the center of her life instead of her Centered Vision—is to differentiate between responsibilities and projects. This differentiation is organizational business coach Katie Matusky’s magic formula for getting the Non-Negotiables done with the least amount of effort and in the fastest way possible. Once you do, you’ll spend less time on the small, inconsequential, rotating items on your personal to-do list (like tidying up your office every day) and more time on the deeper work you need to do but keep putting off because you can never get to it (like organizing all five of your file cabinets).

Responsibilities are activities in your life that can be defined as:

1. Not having an end date

2. A standard you’ve set for yourself that you need to maintain

Think laundry, dishes, and spot cleaning at home or answering emails and documenting client calls at work. For example, if you’ve decided (either consciously or subconsciously) that at your house, you’ll load the dishwasher after every meal and have every counter clear at the end of the night, that’s the standard you’ve set for kitchen cleanup. It’s a never-ending responsibility. As soon as you finish the task, the dishes start piling up again and your work in the kitchen starts again.

Projects are defined as:

1. A series of tasks linked to a goal
2. Action items that fall off of your to-do list once they’re complete

Think organizing your garage, cleaning out your closet, and painting the baby’s room at home or redesigning a website for a client at work. These aren’t to-dos you do every day, all day long. They are larger activities that happen less frequently. Projects make you feel accomplished and satisfied when you tackle them, but they can be overwhelming to start and stick with because they take multiple, small steps to complete, whereas responsibilities are usually simpler and faster. For example, if one of your projects is to complete your taxes, you have to collect all your paperwork, document your deductions, make an appointment with your accountant, and submit your final return. All of that takes planning and time.

Even though it feels amazing to complete projects, often we don’t get to them because while they’re less consequential, our responsibilities eat up more of our time. Frequently, we end our days feeling like we didn’t do much at all, even though we actually ran to and fro for hours. That can make us feel discouraged and unmotivated. Katie’s four-step formula, though, allows us to spend more time on our projects and less on our responsibilities, helping us move the needle forward toward our bigger goals. 

Your Next Steps

Want to read more? Check out Doing it All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You're Meant to Be in paperback, eBook, and audiobook.