Planning for Progress
October 16, 2025
Learn how detailed, action-oriented, task lists can stop you from back-tracking, and help you make measurable progress across your business.
It's your weekly dose of clarity and insight on all things tech & business from Dream in Digital! Each week, I'm here to share my thoughts to help you make the most of today's technology and build a business that genuinely supports the life you want to live.
This Week’s Core Focus:
Leveling Up Your Progress
Have you ever played a (story-mode) video game and needed to save your progress? That save button is crucial, right? You're not going to beat the game in one sitting, so you need a way to secure your momentum and come back later.
In business, your task lists are that save button. If you're not tracking things on a granular, detailed level, you're forcing yourself to replay the game. Imagine having to re-do the last few levels every time, just to pick up where you left off—that's what happens when entrepreneurs don't keep things organized or add enough detail to their to-do list. They waste precious time backtracking, repeating "levels," and stunting their progress.
Stop replaying the game and making it harder for yourself! Here are three ways to bring that save button into the real world to ensure your business makes real progress:
Build the Bigger Picture: When you’re organized, it’s easier for the mind to see the bigger picture and then act! Having different task lists for each division of your business, or each service area you’re working on for your clients, helps you build the story for the work you’re going to do and enter into the right mindset to do that work efficiently. It's like your video game's loading screen: build the scene, and you'll more easily remember where you left off.
Stop Listing "To-Do’s" ; Start Listing "Next Actions": Your task lists shouldn't say generic things like "Website Redesign" or “Onboarding.” Those should be the task group titles from where you would then go in and list all of the detailed tasks & sub-tasks for each of those, like “Acquire a website domain” or “Get access to the client’s website.” This clarity through detail minimizes mental friction and helps you focus on things that actually move the needle.
Make Time for Focused Work: It can feel nice to be in meetings all day because you feel important, but unless you're walking away with strong action items (aka tasks), you're really just talking. Getting things done means needing to spend time actually doing the work. You'll be surprised at how quickly you can make progress when you block time off for focused work and have a strong, actionable, game plan in place.
Tech Tip of the Week:
Designing Your Game Plan
The Problem: There are only so many hours in the day, and you need a system to "hit save" on different areas of your business, so you can quickly return to making progress, when the time permits.
The Solution: Let's discuss a simple Google Tasks setup (or a project management tool setup) to keep you and your team on track.
Step 1: Core Task Lists (The Divisions)
Create separate top-level lists for the core divisions of your business:
Sales
Marketing
Accounting & Finance
Operations
Legal
Etc.
Step 2: Task Groups (The Departments)
Within each Core Task List, create groups or tasks that represent higher-level work items, to continue building the bigger picture.
Here’s an example of different task groups for the Marketing Core Task List:
Website (aka The Endpoint)
Email & SMS Marketing (aka Retention)
Social Media (aka Organic Outreach)
Paid Advertising (aka Paid Outreach)
Step 3: Tasks & Subtasks (The Actions)
Now you can get down to the granular, action items. Use tasks and subtasks to build out the missions (tasks) and objectives (subtasks) of your “story”, so you can tackle the work in sequential order.
Here’s an example for the Email & SMS Marketing Task Group:
+ Create a Content Calendar for the Month (Task)
Define content pillars (Subtask)
Confirm send dates (Subtask)
Assign content pillars to send dates (Subtask)
Draft creatives (Subtask)
+ Email #1 (Task)
Copywriting (Subtask)
Design (Subtask)
Audience Selection (Subtask)
Deployment (Subtask)
+ SMS #1 (Task)
Copywriting (Subtask)
Design (Subtask)
Audience Selection (Subtask)
Deployment (Subtask)
+ Etc.
How This Helps: This level of detail is what allows you to go from "what was I doing," to task completed—with a lot less thinking and a lot more doing. That’s how you make real progress!